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IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH/' 

SERMONS PREACHED IN MARLBOROUGH COLLEGE. 



/ 






"IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH." 



W 



SERMONS ON PRACTICAL SUBJECTS, 

PREACHED AT MARLBOROUGH COLLEGE, 

From 1871 to 1876 k 




FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., 



11 

CANON OF WESTMINSTER ; RECTOR OF ST. MARGARET'S, WESTMINSTER ; 

CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN ; FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE ) 

CAMBRIDGE ; AND LATE MASTER, OF MARLBOROUGH COLLEGE. 



THIRD EDITION. 

^io goxk: 
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY, 

713 Broadway. 

1877. 



[The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.] 



31/4310 

PS 

1^11 



LONDON : 

R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTER5, 

BREAD STREET HILL, 

QUEEN VICTORIA STREET; E.C 



ByTr»M*r 



DEDICATION. 

To the Council of Marlborough College ; — to the beloved 
memory of Bishop Cotton; — to my honoured friend and 
predecessor, the Master of University College, Oxford ; — to my 
Colleagues, whose high aims and self denying labours have 
secured the progress and prosperity of the College during 
the past six years; — to the Prefects, tvho have been my 
immediate pupils, and of whom I trust that many will 
henceforth be lifelong friends; — to the hundreds of Marl- 
borough Boys, whose diligence, goodness, and loyalty have 
caused me such deep and > enduring happiness — 

These few of the many Sermons delivered in the College 
Chapel between January 29, 1871, and July 23, 1876. 



PREFACE. 

The following Sermons are, almost exclusively, 
occupied with practical subjects bearing upon 
school life. The publication of them is the 
last proof I can give of the undying affec- 
tion which I shall always retain for Marlborough 
College, and of the deep and sacred interest 
which I shall always feel in those among 
whom, for six years, it was my privilege to 
live. 

This volume must not be regarded as repre- 
sentative of my entire teaching. Asked to 
publish some of my school sermons, I have 
selected those only which were more or less 
special in character or treatment. Hence I 
have excluded from this volume the many 



rat PREFACE. 



sermons which I preached on the great 
doctrinal truths of Christianity ; those which 
were suggested by the Fasts and Festivals 
of our Church ; those on different Scripture 
characters ; those which pleaded the cause of 
various charities ; those that dwelt exclusively 
on the Life, the Parables, the Miracles, the 
Cross and Passion, the Eesurrection and Ascen- 
sion, of our Saviour Christ. Many of these 
might doubtless, in a literary sense, have been 
regarded as better and more valuable than some 
here published. But this volume is not pub- 
lished on literary grounds at all. All my 
sermons were necessarily composed as they 
were required, in brief intervals from much 
labour and incessant interruption ; they were 
never intended for publication ; and have neither 
been altered nor elaborated since. 

Any value they may possess depends on 
their being left as they were written — with all 
their intentional repetitions, with the absence 
of references and authorities, which I could 
not always give, and in the style intended 



PREFACE. ix 



solely for oral delivery. I know that those 
who heard them, and for whose sake they are 
mainly published, will receive them kindly, 
and will read them with no other desire than 
that of reviving those good impressions which 
I trust that, by God's grace, they sometimes 
produced in faithful hearts. 



St. Margaret's Kectory, Westminster, 
October 9, 1876. 



CONTENTS 



SEEMON I. 

PAGE 

STANDING BEFORE GOD 1 



SEEMON II. 

LITTLE FAITHFULNESSES 11 

SERMON III. 

HUNGERING AND THIRSTING AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS ... 21 

SERMON IV. 

THE RIGHT USE OF SPEECH 30 

SERMON Y. 

SMOULDERING LAMPS 41 

SERMON VI. 

ASPICE, PROSPICE, RESPICE 51 

» 



xii CONTENTS. 



SERMON VII. 

PAGE 

LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKED 61 



SERMON VIIT. 

QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE 72 

SEEMON IX. 

THE GRAIN OP MUSTARD SEED 80 

SERMON X. 

INNOCENT HAPPINESS 89 

SERMON XI. 

SCHOOL AND HOME 99 

SERMON XII. 

SELF-CONQUEST 110 

SERMON XIII. 

THE PERIL OF WASTE .......: 119 

SERMON XIV. 

CALLING THINGS BY THEIR WRONG NAMES ...... 129 

SERMON XV. 

COUNTERBALANCE EVIL WITH GOOD . e . . ., . . 1.39 



CONTENTS. xiii 



SERMON XVI. 

PAGE 

THINKING OF GOD 148 



SERMON XVII. 

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PRAYER 159 

SERMON XVIII. 

SOWING AMONG THORNS 169 

SERMON XIX. 

HOW TO KEEP GOOD RESOLUTIONS 179 

SERMON XX. 

THE OBJECTS OF SCHOOL LIFE 189 

SERMON XXI. 

EXCUSES TO MAN AND TO GOD 199 

SERMON XXII. 

THE TEMPLE OF THE GOD OF TRUTH 209 

SERMON XXIII. 

DRIFTING AWAY , 219 

SERMON XXIV. 

THE HISTORY AND HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL .... 23C 



xiv CONTENTS. 



SERMON XXV. 

PAGE 

THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING FROM CONSTANT 

ASSOILMENT 243 



SERMON XXVI. 

SOBERMINDEDNESS 254 

SERMON XXVII. 

NOT FAR FROM THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 265 

SERMON XXVIII. 

RUNNERS FOR A PRIZE 275 

SERMON XXIX. 

THE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS , . 285 

SERMON XXX. 

HOW TO RESIST THE DEVIL 297 

SERMON XXXI. 

HOLIDAY ADVICE 307 

SERMON XXXII. 

BLAMELESS AND HARMLESS . . 316 

SERMON XXXIII. 

HANDWRITINGS ON THE WALL 325 



CONTENTS. xv 



SEKMON XXXIV. 

PA.GE 

THE COURAGE OF THE SAINTS POSSIBLE IN BOYHOOD . . 337 



SERMON XXXY. 

THE TRIPLE SANCTIF1CATION 349 

SERMON XXXVI. 

TRUTHFULNESS AND HONESTY 358 

SERMON XXXVII. 

SCHOOL GAMES 367 

SERMON XXXVIII. 

FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE 376 

SERMON XXXIX. 

LAST WORDS 389 



IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. 

§>txmom ^tzwcbzb m ^Jmlhoxoxx^l} (Kolfege. 

r OCT 23 1882 J 

I.— STANDING BEFORE GOD. 

Deitt. xxix. 10. 
* i Ye stand this day all of you before the Lord your God 

So spake Moses, the strong and patient servant of God, 
in one of those powerful addresses with which the Book 
of Deuteronomy is filled. They were uttered at the close 
of the wanderings in the wilderness, when the prophet 
was already old ; but as the one hundred and twenty 
years of his marvellous life had not dimmed his eye or 
abated his natural force, so neither had the cares and 
sorrows of a dread responsibility quenched the fire of 
his words or the force of his convictions. Disappointed 
of the high reward for which his soul had longed, suf- 
fered only to see the Holy Land which he had once 
hoped that his feet should tread, he still remained faith- 
ful and tender, and wavered neither in his allegiance to 
God nor in his love to man. Unselfish to the last, the 
old chieftain summoned around him the children of his 
heart ; and as the captains of the tribes, and eLders, and 
officers, and all the men of Israel, nay, even their little 

M. S. B 



- 



2 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

ones, and the hewers of wood and drawers of water, sat 
listening at his feet, he reiterated again and again, in 
language which must have smitten their hearts like the 
thunders of Sinai, the blessings and curses, the sanctions 
and prohibitions of the fiery law ! And then, inviting 
them to bind their souls with a sacred covenant, he 
prefaces it with these words of solemn import : " Ye 
stand this day all of you before the Lord your God." 

Intense in their significance — fresh in their solemnity 
— as when Moses uttered them to the listening multi- 
tudes on the farther shores of Jordan, the echo of those 
warning words rolls to us across the centuries. They 
express the formative principle, the regulating concep- 
tion, the inspiring impulse of every greatly Christian 
life. The very differentia of such a life, — that is, its 
distinguishing feature, — is this, that it is spent always 
and consciously in the presence of God. 

" It sliall be still in strictest measure even 
To that same lot, however mean or high, 
Towards which Time leads us, and the will of heaven. 
All is if I have grace to use it so, 
As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." 

And in proportion to our faith is the vividness and 
reality wherewith, like Moses, we see God — like Enoch 
walk, like Abraham converse, like Jacob wrestle with 
Him, like Elijah thrill to the inward whisper of His still 
small voice. There are, 'indeed, some eyes so dim that 
they catch no gleam of His Presence ; some ears so dull 
that they never hear the music or the thunder of His 
voice ; and there are moments when even to the best 
of men He seems silent or far off. But when the eyes 
are opened by prayer and penitence, when the ear is 
purged by listening humbly for the revelation of His 
will, then all life, all nature, all history, are full of Him. 



i.] STANDING BEFORE GOB. 3 

Then, Conscience, speak she never so faintly, becomes 
His articulate utterance. Then Experience, seem it 
never so perplexing, is but the unknown pattern which 
He is weaving into the w r eb of our little lives. Then 
even amid the crash of falling dynasties, and the 
struggles of furious nations, we see His guiding hand. 
Then the great open book of the universe reveals Him 
on every page, while, legibly as on the tables of Moses, 
He engraves His name upon the rock tablets of the world ; 
and clearly as on the palace wall of Belshazzar, He letters 
it in fire amid the stars of heaven, in flowers among the 
fields of spring. But whether we see or see not, whether 
we hear or hear not, whether conscience and life be 
voiceful to us or silent, assuredly He is and He speaks 
to us ; assuredly not this day only, but every day, we 
stand each and all of us before the Lord our God. 

I. Let us first strive, my brethren, to recognise the 
fact, and then to consider its consequences. By recog- 
nising the fact I mean that we should endeavour to im- 
press it on our thoughts ; to make it not only theoretical, 
but intensely practical ; to realize it as the principle of 
action, to build upon it as the basis of life. Oh, on this 
first Sunday of a new half-year let every one of us, from 
the oldest to the youngest, strive to feel and know that 
God is ; that He is the rewarder of all them that diligently 
seek Him ; that every sin we commit is committed in 
His presence ; that His eye is always upon us, never 
slumbering nor sleeping : in the busy scenes of day about 
our path ; in the silent watches of the night about our 
bed. Who, my brethren, whether in defiance or in 
terror, whether in prosperity or in despair, ever suc- 
ceeded in concealing himself from God ? Adam in his 
shame and nakedness strove to hide himself among the 
garden trees, and that Voice called him forth. Cain 

B 2 



4 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

would have fled from Him into the land of exile, but 
even there he felt the branding finger upon his brow. 
Hagar despaired of Him, and lo, His angel of mercy 
shone before her at the Beerlahairoi. Jonah rose to flee 
from Him in ships of Tarshish, and met Him in the 
shattered vessel, on the tempestuous sea. He flashed 
upon the dreams of Jacob, in a vision of forgiveness, 
as he slept on the rocky stairs of the steep hill-side. 
" Whither," sang David the guilty adulterer, David the 
weeping penitent, " whither shall I go then from Thy 
Spirit, or whither shall I go then from Thy presence ? 
If I climb up to heaven, Thou art there ; if I go down 
to hell, Thou art there also ; if I take the wings of the 
morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand 
shall guide me." 

Yes, " Thou, God, seest me ! " And when we have 
felt this truth, how does the thought affect us ? what is 
its meaning for us ? Does it inspire us with love, or 
with hatred ? with comfort, or with despair ? 

II. (1.) Our first lesson from it, my brethren, is a sense of 
warning. Surely there is a warning — for the forgetful a 
startling, for the guilty a terrible, even for the good man 
a very solemn warning, in the thought that not only our 
life in its every incident, but even our heart in its in- 
most secrets, lies naked and open before Him with whom 
we have to do. When we remember that He, who 
chargeth even His angels with folly, and in whose sight 
the very heavens are not clean, is always with us ; that 
the very loneliest solitudes are peopled with His 
presence ; that walls do not hide, nor inner-chambers 
conceal us from Him ; that the deepest curtains of 
secrecy and midnight are to Him transparent as the blaze 
of noon, — are we indeed so pure and innocent, is the 



I,] STANDING BEFORE GOD. 5 

white robe of our baptism so utterly unstained, that 
there is no warning for us in that thought? If the 
Gadarenes, anxious for their swine, could flock to Christ 
to entreat that He would depart out of their coasts ; if 
even St. Peter, troubled by the sudden apocalypse of 
His tenderness and power, could fall at His feet, saying, 
" Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord ;." must 
there not be a similar repugnance and alarm in every 
willingly sinful soul? Oh if there be such alarm in 
your soul, be warned in time. If you hate, if you are 
terrified by the thought of God's perpetual presence, 
then be sure that there must be some deep disharmony 
in your being, and be sure that, while this continues, 
you cannot be fulfilling the law of your creation, you 
cannot be at peace with God. 

(2.) But we, my brethren, are Christians ; it ought not 
to be so, I trust that it is not so, with us, for to all who 
have learnt to love and to trust in God, the thought that 
we stand before Him involves not only a sense of 
w T arning, but, secondly, a sense of elevation, of ennoble- 
ment. It is a sweet and a lofty doctrine, the highest 
source of all the dignity and grandeur of life. It is the 
very thing which distinguishes us from the beasts that 
perish. They, so far as we know, feel no responsibility, 
rise to no worship, attain no knowledge, cherish no hope 
for the future, and but a dull, blind memory of the past ; 
until, their unimmortal but sinless destiny being accom- 
plished, 

' ' Something in the darkness draws 
Their foreheads downwards, and they die." 

But man, how different a life is his ! " How noble 
in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and 
moving how express and admirable ! in action how like 



6 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! " x And why ? 
Because He is a son of God, made in His image, an 
inheritor of His kingdom, conscious of His presence. In 
childhood how is he clothed with the charm of inno- 
cence ; in youth, if he be true to himself, how does the 
grace of Heaven take early hold of him as he grow in 
wisdom, and stature, and favour with God and man ; in 
manhood how does he ever become sweeter and purer, 
nobler and loftier ; and in old age, at last, how does the 
fire of his life as it wanes in lustre increase in loveliness — 
as the sun before his setting is gazed upon with more 
of admiration, if with less of awe, while he makes even 
the clouds around him and the waters underneath his 
feet flush into a softer purple and a purer gold ! 

(3) And besides a sense of warning and of elevation, 
a third consequence of life spent consciously in God's 
presence is a firm, unflinching, unwavering sense of 
duty. And surely this sense of duty, so marked a 
feature in every good man's character, is a thing of 
extraordinary dignity. Certainly without it life is 
singularly contemptible, inevitably miserable. Compare 
a river which has burst its banks, and whose waters, 
shallow, polluted, dangerous, first flood the fields with 
devastation, then poison them with malaria — compare it, 
I say, with the same river flowing in its ordered courses, 
majestic with its rejoicing depth, enriching the plains 
with fertility and health, filling (as an Arab poet 
expresses it) its bosom with gold, and robing its path 
in emeralds : — such, my brethren, is a human life 
without, and a human life with, the sense of duty. Or 
compare, again, a vessel, rolling, waterlogged and helpless, 
at the mercy of the storm, — a wind-tossed, melancholy 
hulk on the waste of waters, or a desolate wreck upon 
1 Shakspeare, Hamlet. 



i.] STANDING BEFORE GOB. 7 

the lonely shore, — compare it, I say, with the same 
vessel obeying a very small helm, and therefore cutting 
through the frustrate billows in victorious career, and 
making the very hurricane speed it onwards toward 
the destined shore; — such again, my brethren, is a 
human life without, and a human life with, the sense 
of duty. A life regardful of duty is crowned with an 
object, directed by a purpose, inspired by an enthusiasm, 
till the very humblest routine, carried out conscien- 
tiously s for the sake of God, is elevated into moral 
grandeur ; and the very obscurest office, filled con- 
scientiously at the bidding of God, becomes an imperial 
stage on which all the virtues play. To one who lives 
thus the insignificant becomes important, the unpleasant 
delightful, the evanescent eternal. 

' ' A servant with this clause 

Makes drudgery divine ; 
Who- sweeps a room as for Thy laws 

Makes that and the action fine. 

And do not for a moment, my brethren, suffer this 
idea of Duty to wear a harsh or repulsive aspect to 
your thoughts. Oh give your hearts to her, serve her 
with a manly devotion, and so far from being severe 
or unlovely, this " stern daughter of the voice of God," 
hand in hand with her sister Wisdom, shall guide you 
along the path of a godly and honourable life, till at the 
touching of their sacred feet the very wilderness, aye, the 
very thorns of the wilderness, shall blossom as the rose. 
(4.) But, as a fourth consequence, there is something 
loftier and lovelier than even a sense of duty, which 
results from a consciousness of standing in the presence 
of God — it is the sense of holiness. It is a solemn 
thought that a man may perform his duties, and yet not 
be a holy man; he may be apparently upright, not really 



8 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

innocent ; outwardly conscientious, not inwardly sincere. 
It is one thing to be " not far from the kingdom of God," 
another to be a member thereof; one thing to be near 
the gate of heaven, another thing to be therein. I do not 
mean that men are open and conscious hypocrites. These, 
I believe, are very rare. But it is mostly som^ cherished 
idol, some wilful reservation, some favourite temptation, 
in a word, some besetting sin, that makes men fall 
short of that truth in the inward parts which God 
requires, and which, to those who seek for it and love 
it, He will give. For God says — tenderly indeed, yet 
absolutely — "My son, give Me thine heart." He says, 
" Be ye holy, for I am holy." He forbids us, not only 
to seek our own pleasure, or do our own waiys, but even 
to think our own thoughts ; He requires not only duty, 
but holiness; He searcheth the spirits; He discerneth 
the very reins and hearts. 

(5.) Who, my brethren, is sufficient for these things ? 
If we have fallen far short of duty, how then shall we 
attain to holiness ? And yet without holiness no man 
shall see the Lord. Oh, who shall arm us for the dread 
struggle of the future ? Who shall forgive us all the sad 
failures, all the foolish errors, all the wilful wanderings, 
of the past ? My brethren, this text will give us the 
answer. We stand, all of us, before the Lord our God. 
The knowledge of this not only warns us, not only 
ennobles us, not only inspires us with a sense of duty, 
not only convinces us of the necessity for holiness, but 
lastly, it encourages us with a certainty of help and 
strength. That God before whom we stand is not only 
our Judge and our Creator, but also our Father and our 
Friend. Behold Him revealed to us in Christ, our 
elder Brother in the great family of God ! He feels for all 
our infirmities. He can sympathise in all our sorrows. 



I.] STANDING BEFORE GOD. 



He has conquered all our temptations. He has borne 
the dread burden of all our sins. The pulse of every 
beating heart is known to Him. He sees every tear 
we shed. He considers every wish we cherish. He 
answers every true prayer we breathe. In the depth 
of humiliation He is with us. In the rough places His 
angels catch us by the hand. In the valley of the 
shadow of death — where none can accompany us — His 
brightness illumines every dreadful downward step. 
My brethren, doubtless we shall all find difficulties, 
troubles, temptations here, and the very worst of them 
will come from our own wayward, wandering hearts ; 
well, let us face them bravely, humbly, cheerfully ; let 
us remember that it was He who placed us in the midst 
of them, because He meant us to resist, because He 
will help us to conquer them. Fear not; even the 
youngest and weakest here He loves ; let us be true to 
the higher law of our nature ; let us remember that 
God sees us ; and then let us doubt not, but earnestly 
believe that He will accept us in the Beloved as His 
redeemed, forgiven sons. Only believe in Him, and He 
will lead you by the hand through a happy and uncor- 
rupted youth to the firm threshold of a godly manhood ; 
will, in the hour of death, fling open before you the gates 
of everlasting life ; will, in the day of judgment, pro- 
nounce those blessed words, for which a life of the worst 
agony would cheaply pay, — " Servant of God, well done !" 
Lessons, then, of warning, of elevation, of duty, of 
holiness, of help, — these are what we should set before 
us. Oh, my brethren, that we may learn these lessons, 
keeping them before us consciously ; knowing ourselves 
to be bound by them inflexibly; feeling ourselves 
encouraged by them daily and hourly ! For in a sense 
yet more solemn than ordinary do we stand, all of us, 
on this day, on this first Sunday of a new half-year, 



10 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. i. 



before the Lord our God. On this day He gives you the 
inestimable blessing of a fresh start in serving Him, a 
new opportunity to devote yourselves to Him. Oh may 
you who are new boys among us determine on this day 
to commit yourselves and your ways unto the Lord, 
sure that if you do He will be your shield and buckler. 
And you who are already familiar with this place, if 
you have by His blessing humbly striven to serve Him 
hitherto, oh seek by His grace to serve Him also hence- 
forth with yet deeper devotion, with yet sincerer 
earnestness ; and if you have been faithless, unholy, 
guilty before Him, oh let the time past suffice, and turn 
to Him now in this accepted time, now on this day of 
salvation. So may His best blessing, without which 
nothing is strong, nothing is holy, rest upon us all : on 
us who teach, inspiring us with wisdom, and self-denial, 
and unwearied energy, and holy purpose ; on you who 
learn, clothing you with the heavenly grace of reverent 
and earnest spirits; kindling your ardour with the certain 
victory of the strong in faith; crowning your efforts 
with the priceless beatitude of the pure in heart. And 
that this blessing may rest upon us, let us seek it now, 
out of a pure heart fervently. Brethren, pray for us. 
Let us, as we kneel in earnest prayer, each ask God's 
blessing for himself, as each also for one another, and 
all for this place which we all love, that it may be 
always a place of sound learning and religious education, 
and that each son of this school may rise hereafter to 
call it blessed, having been trained therein to be a 
profitable member of the Church and commonwealth, 
that he may be hereafter, by God's grace, a partaker of 
the immortal glory of the resurrection through Jesus 
Christ our Lord. 

February 12, 1871. 



SERMON II. 
LITTLE FAITHFULNESSES. 

Luke xvi. 10. 

" He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: 
and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." 

You have just been listening, my brethren, to the 
parable of the Unjust Steward, of which these words 
form the sequel. Into the difficulties of that parable it 
is not now my purpose to enter ; but surely they have 
been greatly exaggerated. The master of the steward 
approved of his dexterity, not of his fraudulence ; he 
praised him, not because he had done wisely, cro<£<£?, but 
prudently, fypovifjbux;. The parable is but another illustra- 
tion of the warning, "Be ye prudent, <f>povL/JLol, as serpents, 
yet harmless as doves." If, in the thirst for power — if, 
in the greed of gain — the children of this generation 
can show tact and zeal, imitate those qualities in a better 
cause, win the treasures of heaven with that toil where- 
with they heap up for themselves the wealth of earth, 
And, in doing this, neglect nothing ; — underrate no virtue 
because you esteem it trivial — commit no wrong because 
you hold it small. There is a duty and a glory in little 
faithfulnesses. There is a peril and a shame in little 
sins. 

You will see that there are two parts of the text, 
and we might dwell with profit upon either. " He that 



12 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." What 
a world of warning lies in those words ! The little 
foxes that spoil the vines — the little canker that slays 
the oak — the little leak which ever gains upon the 
vessel till it sinks — the little fissure in the mountain- 
side, out of which the lava pours — the little rift within 
the lute that, slowly widening, makes the music mute — 
what are all these, in their ruinous influence, but a fit 
emblem of the sinfulness of little sins ? how do they 
illustrate that old proverb that the mother of mischief 
is no bigger than a midge's wing! Yes, my brethren, 
small injustices are but the wet and slippery stepping- 
stones down into deeper waters. He who is unjust in a 
penny now may be so in thousands of pounds hereafter. 
He who is not perfectly honest in trifles now, may, if 
unchecked, develop, in later life, a character radically 
untrustworthy — fundamentally unsound. Therefore, 
my brethren, let us be in all our dealings transparent 
as the day; let us all proudly and kindly encourage 
each other to shun and to scorn, in all our doings, the 
faintest spot of suspicion and dishonour ; let us, if it 
occurs, put our foot firmly upon it as we would upon a 
spark where a magazine was near, knowing with what 
a monotonous and fatal echo the records of men's lives 
sigh back their confirmation to that solemn warning, 
" He that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." 
But, my brethren, though it may often be our duty 
to dwell on topics such as these — though, as we were 
wisely warned last Sunday, it is a dangerous and timid 
optimism which is afraid to call sin sin, or to ignore 
the shame and the sorrow wherewith God has burnt a 
mark upon its brow, yet it is always a happier and 
more hopeful thing to dwell upon the other side — on 
obedience rather than on transgression — on the high 



il] LITTLE FAITHFULNESSES. 13 

happiness which ministers to virtue rather than on the 
retribution which dogs the heels of vice. Let us, then, 
this morning, passing by the sombre conclusion of the 
text, touch lightly — for more than this is impossible — 
upon its happy prophecy : let us take for our brief 
meditation the glory and the blessing of little faithful- 
nesses. 

1. Little faithfulnesses : it is all the more necessary for 
us to contemplate them, because it is not these in 
general which men venerate or admire. We praise the 
high — the splendid — the heroic : we dwell on the great 
deeds — on the glorious sacrifices. When you read how 
the lady of the house of Douglas thrust her own arm 
through the bolt grooves of the door and let the 
murderers break it while her king had time to hide; 
or how the pilot of Lake Erie stood undaunted upon 
the burning deck, and, reckless of the intense agony, 
steered the crew safe to the jetty, and then fell dead 
among the crackling flames ; or how the Eussian serf, 
to save his master and his master's children, sprang out 
from the sledge among the wolves that howled after 
them through the winter snow ; or, once more, how, 
amid the raging storm, the young girl sat with her 
father at the oar to save the shipwrecked sailors from 
the shrouds of the shattered wreck — whose soul is so 
leaden that it does not thrill with admiration at deeds 
like these ? But think you, my brethren, that these 
brave men and women sprang, as it were, full-sized into 
their heroic stature? Nay; but, like the gorgeous 
blossom of the aloe, elaborated through long years of 
silent and unnoticed growth, so these deeds were but 
the bright consummate flower borne by lives of quiet, 
faithful, unrecorded service ; and no one, be sure, has 
ever greatly done or gloriously dared who has not been 



14 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [skrm. 



familiar with the grand unselfishness of little duties ; 
who has not offered to God — more precious than the 
temple altars smoking with hecatombs of spotless lambs 
— the daily sacrifice of a contrite heart — the daily 
discipline of a chastened life. You would be like these ? 
Well, it is a great ambition. But if you would not be 
false to it, show now, in little things, of what stuff your 
hearts are made, and you will not then be unprepared 
if God should ever require of you the hero's courage or 
the martyr's faith. Fourteen years ago, when England 
had been agonised by the horrors and massacres of 
the great Indian mutiny, then the daring genius and 
inflexible will of one great soldier carried a handful of 
troops across flooded rivers and burning plains. He 
was an old man, for the fire of life may die away in the 
white ashes of a mean career, but it glows to the last in 
the generous and the true, and he died in the effort 
before he knew of the honours heaped upon him by 
grateful England, though not before he had saved the 
brightest jewel in England's crown. To Sir Henry 
Havelock the opportunity for showing to all the world 
the moral greatness which was in him did not come till 
he was sixty-two ; but do you think that, in God's 
sight, that pure and unselfish life would have been one 
whit less beautiful if the opportunity had never come ? 
Had Henry Havelock died a poor struggling officer, 
unknown beyond the limits of his own regiment, think 
you that in the angel-registers the record would have 
been less bright ? Or may it not rather be that, — in those 
biographies which are written only in God's Book of 
Life — the quiet patience of one who had been but a 
neglected lieutenant till the age of forty-three — the 
unmurmuring simplicity with which, on the very 
morning of victory, he resigned the chief command 



ii.] LITTLE FAITHFULNESSES. 15 

into another's hands, — the moral courage, which, 
amid a godless society, made him invite his men 
to join with him in prayer, and not wince under the 
sneering title of Havelock's saints, — may it not be, 
I say, that these little faithfulnesses are written in 
brighter letters than the victory at Alumbagh, or than 
the salvation of India by that great march, through 
scorching heat and drenching rain, from Cawnpore to 
Lucknow ? If then you would do great deeds hereafter, 
prepare for them, rehearse them, show yourselves fit for 
them now. " He that is faithful in that which is least 
is faithful also in much." 

2. But, secondly, remember that if the opportunity 
for great deeds should never come, the opportunity for 
good deeds is renewed for you day by day. The thing 
for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory, and in 
the words of the poet — 

" One small touch of charity 

Would raise us nearer godlike state, 
Than if the crowded orb should cry- 
As those who cried Diana great." 

Do you desire that, hereafter, the world should ring 
with your name coupled to some heroic action, or that, 
in the annals of earthly goodness, it should be em- 
blazoned in lines of gold ? Well, as you grow older 
and wiser, as your eyes are enlightened to distinguish 
the substance from the shadow, you will learn to value 
and covet the spirit, not the sign of it ; the high motive, 
not the tangible result ; the simple faithfulness, not the 
echoing recognition ; the quiet lightning-deed, 

* ' Not that applauding thunder at its heels 
Which men call fame." 

You will repeat the prayer which an unhappy queen of 
our own royal house inscribed with a diamond upon her 



16 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

castle window, " Oh keep me innocent, make others great." 
Most of us, my brethren, perhaps every one of us will 
but die in the round of common duties, in the fulfilment 
of an ordinary routine ; happy if that routine be accepted 
loyally ; happy if those duties be faithfully performed. 
For if life be a battle-field, then, like other battle-fields, 
it is won by the nameless multitudes, by the unrecorded 
hosts. The great leaders fight and fall conscious that 
theirs shall be the glory of the victory ; but as the thin 
red lines advance to battle amid the storm of shells, 
each peasant-soldier knows well that where he falls the 
poppy and the violet shall but blossom over a nameless 
grave, and yet they advance unflinching to the batteries 
whose cross-fire vomits death upon them, and so — as a 
generous leader once exclaimed — and so " they die by 
thousands those unnamed demi-gods." 1 They give their 
lives ; and what can a king do more ? And we too — 
however common-place, however humble — we too can 
keep the ranks unbroken ; we too can be of " the faithful 
who were not famous;" we too can make sure that 
where we stand, there at least, in the great Armageddon, 
by the grace of God, there shall be no swerving in the 
line ; and thereby shall our little service be, as has well 
been said, " precious as the continuity of sunbeams is 
precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barren- 
ness ;" 2 precious as the drops of rain are precious, though 
some of them seem to be wasted in idle dimples upon 
the shipless main ! 

3. Little faithfulnesses then are not only the pre- 
paration for great ones, but little faithfulnesses are 
in themselves the great ones. Observe the striking fact 
that our Lord does not say, " He that is faithful in that 
which is least will be faithful also in much," but " He 
1 Kossuth, 2 George Eliot. . 



ii.] LITTLE FAITHFULNESSES. 17 

than is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in 
much." The essential fidelity of the heart is the same 
whether it be exercised in two mites or in a regal 
treasury ; the genuine faithfulness of the life is equally 
beautiful whether it be displayed in governing an empire 
or in writing an exercise. It has been quaintly said 
that if God were to send two angels to earth, the one to 
occupy a throne, and the other to clean a road, they 
would each regard their employments as equally distin- 
guished and equally happy. In the poem of Theocrite, 
the Archangel Gabriel takes the poor boy's place : — 

" Then to his poor trade he turned, 
By which the daily bread was earned ; 
And ever o'er the trade he bent, 
And ever lived on earth content ; 
He did God's will : to him all one 
If on the earth, or in the sun." x 

Yes, the insignificance of our worldly rank affects in 
nowise our membership of the spiritual aristocracy. 
The thing really important is, not the trust committed 
to us, but the loyalty wherewith we fulfil it. All of us 
may be, in St. Paul's high language, fellow-labourers 
with God ; and he who is that, be he slave or angel, 
can be nothing better or greater. The mountains cease 
to be colossal, the ocean tides lose their majesty, if you 
see what an atom our earth is in the starry space. Even 
so turn the telescope of faith to heaven, and see how 
at once earth's grandeurs dwindle into nothingness, and 
Heaven's least interests dilate into eternal breadth, 
Yes, to be a faithful Christian is greater in God's sight 
than to be a triumphant statesman or a victorious* 
emperor. " God's heroes may be the world's helots." 
" God's prophets, best or worst, are we — there is no last 
or first." 

1 R. Browning. 
M. S. 



18 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

4. Let a very few remaining words endeavour, yet 
more practically, to apply to our present needs and 
circumstances these mighty and consoling truths. 

I. And first I would ask, Do any of you regard your 
boyhood, with its subjection to parents and masters, and 
Its general state of discipline and tutelage, as " that 
which is least ? " Do you yearn for the greater day, 
as perhaps you think it, when you shall be free to choose 
in life your own path and your own pursuits, none 
hindering you ? Well, to you I say solemnly, " He that 
is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much ; 
and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." 
What you are now the chances are that, in the main, you 
will be hereafter. The boy is father to the man. Be 
false and treacherous, be uujust or impure, be indolent 
and disobedient now, and you will either be saved so as 
by fire, or you will grow up into a useless, dangerous, 
degraded man. And, on the other hand, be good and 
faithful, be pure and honest, be brave and generous now, 
and then be very sure that God will make you a worthy 
son of the school that trained, a worthy citizen of the 
nation that nurtured you; nay more, a true child of 
God, a certain inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. 
The servant that used rightly his two talents was 
made ruler over many things. No servant of God ever 
yet missed of Jais infinite reward. " Heaven," as was said 
by the great teacher of China, 1 " heaven means principle." 

II. And lastly, I would say to you, not only be faith- 
ful in this the least part of your life, but try to be 
faithful in the least things which concern it. Count 
nothing slight, says the wise son of Sirach, whether it 
be great or small. Life is made up of little things, just 
as time at the longest is but an aggregate of seconds. 

1 Confucius. 



ii.] LITTLE FAITHFULNESSES. 19 

Be an act ever so unimportant, the principle involved 
in our acts is not unimportant. You say that there is 
very little harm in this or that ; if there is even a little 
harm in it then there is great harm in it. A feather will 
show you the direction of the wind ; a straw will prove 
the set of a current. And this is why Christ says, " Be ye 
perfect." It is a precept intensely practical. No day 
passes but what we can put it into action. Here, for 
instance, in this your school life, not to speak of the 
weightier matters of the law, little punctualities, little 
self-denials, little honesties, little passing words of sym- 
pathy, little nameless acts of kindness, little silent 
victories over favourite temptations — these are the little 
threads of gold, which, when woven together, gleam out 
so brightly in the pattern of a life that God approves. 
Let me illustrate the last only, and it shall be from a 
source which you will all reverence, for it is from th@ 
life of that good Bishop to whom Marlborough looks as 
her father and second founder. Bishop Cotton was 
blessed, says his biography, with a remarkably sweet and 
even temper, but in India a land of many irritations 
and small worries, it was often tried. A cloud would 
gather for a few moments on his countenance ; but ordi- 
narily by entire silence he checked the hasty word. 
Very rarely, however, an expression of annoyance 
escaped him ; and here comes what I would ask you to 
consider. Surely, you will say, a passing irritation, a 
momentary haste, were very small faults, hardly faults 
at all. Not so, thought that noble heart. He was 
faithful, you see, in little things. " His self-condemna- 
tion afterwards," continues his biographer, "was truly 
that godly sorrow that worketh repentance, and could 
spring only from the heart and conscience of one who 
1 Life of Bishop Cotton. 

c 2 



20 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. ii. 

feels that he has, for the moment, failed in allegiance to 
Him in whom alone lies the strength for a sinners 
victory/' "In the most trivial temptations he sought to 
maintain that warfare against sin which made his 
whole life, as it ripened towards its close, a religion, 
a devotion, an act of faith." 

That example, my brethren, belongs especially to us ; 
we claim it, and we feel it to be ours ; like a sweet 
savour, like a precious heritage, it lingers here ; and 
that life was pre-eminently moulded on the principle 
which I have roughly striven to illustrate : " He that 
is faithful in the least is faithful also in much ; and he 
that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." 

March 5, 1871. 



SEEMON" III. 

HUNGERING AND THIRSTING AFTER 
RIGHTEO USNESS. 

Matt. v. 6. 

"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness : 
for they shall be filled." 

It was indeed a new revelation that Sermon on the 
Mount, to part of which you have just been listening ; — 
new in its method, new in its substance, new in its 
results. It was new in its method ; — for at Sinai out of 
the thick darkness, amid the rolling thunder, God had 
spoken of old to a wandering nation as they trembled 
at the base of the burning hill ; but now on the green 
grass, among the mountain lilies, beside the limpid lake, 
with the infinite tenderness of sympathy and sorrow, the 
lips of the Son of Man spake softly the utterance of 
G od. It was new in its substance ; — for there were no 
narrow prohibitions here, no Levitical ceremonies, no 
transitory concessions, no statutes that were not good, 
and judgments whereby they should not live, but the 
eternal, transcendent, unshaken law of mercy and self- 
denial, of tenderness and love. It was new in its 
results ; — for that fiery law did but curb and crush one 
obstinate and rebellious people with a burden which 
neither they nor their fathers were able to bear ; but this 



22 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

was to be a delight for all and for ever, it was to come 
like a fresh youth to a diseased and decrepit world, 
revivifying as the summer sunlight, beneficent as the 
universal air. 

Whichever one we selected of those divine beatitudes, 
with which, as with a song sweeter than ever angel 
sang, our Lord began His Sermon on the Mount, we 
should find it full of instruction, and we should find it 
opposed diametrically to the vulgar teaching of the 
world. And let us admit at once that there are aspects 
in which these beatitudes seem too high for your 
youthful age, " Blessed are the poor in spirit ; " but how 
impetuous and resentful, how swift and self-reliant is 
the heart of youth ! " Blessed are they that mourn ; " 
but can we dwell on this to you at an age which, as the 
poet-preacher expresses it, " danceth like a bubble, empty 
and gay, and shineth like a dove's neck, or the image of 
a rainbow which' hath no substance, and whose very 
imagery and colours are fantastical." " Blessed are the 
merciful ; " " Blessed are the peace-makers ; " " Blessed 
are the pure in heart." Yes, these, doubtless, you might 
learn even now to practise and to understand, but can 
we hope that you will see any force in this also, " Blessed 
are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness : for 
they shall be filled ? " It was natural for David, the old 
worn king, for David, who, after all the buffetings of a 
stormy life, had learnt, even if it were by evil, that good 
was best — it was natural, I say, for him to exclaim, " As 
the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my 
soul after thee, God ! " But such would be in general 
but exotic and artificial language for most of you. Look 
at the corn-fields now, and you will see only the green 
blade, barely struggling into the sunlight out of the 
frosty soil : we do not look yet for the ear, much less 



in.] THIRSTING AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS. 23 

for the ripe corn in the ear ; nor in the inexperienced 
neophyte and the timid catechumen do we expect the 
vision of the mystic and the rapture of the saint 
Some, indeed, there may be of you, of whom, in silence 
and in secret, the grace of God has taken such early 
hold that to them even such words as these may come of 
right ; but for most of you, as yet, it is enough if the 
hunger and thirst after righteousness has taken this 
form : — that you abhor that which is evil, and cleave to 
that which is good ; that, recognizing the blazonry of 
your high birth, you scorn and loathe all meanness and 
malice, all cruelty and lies ; that, feeling, as it were, the 
symbol of certain victory which was marked upon your 
forehead in your baptism, you turn with a certain 
honest haughtiness of nature from the baser and more 
degrading forms of vice ; that in the determination to 
live by God's grace lives pure, and brave, and service- 
able, you have, as it were, already set your feet upon 
the mountain and turned your eyes towards the sun. 
Would to God that every one of you had gone as far as 
this ! It is true that righteousness, in the language of 
Scripture, means more than this, — more than moral 
culture, more than gradual improvement, more than the 
natural integrity of a rightly-constituted soul. It means 
the devoted service of God ; it means the constraining 
love of Christ ; it means the unutterable yearning of the 
Spirit for all that is divine. But, nevertheless, virtue, 
if it be not as yet righteousness, is yet the sweetest 
flower which blooms beside that narrow path. It has 
been truly said by a moralist of the eighteenth century — 
may you all remember that admirable definition ! — that 
virtue is the conquest of self for the benefit of others ; 
and in this aspect, at least, to disparage virtue because 
as yet it is not holiness, is to disparage the blossom 



24 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

because it is not yet the fruit. And if you are aiming at 
this, if you have realised already the sanctity of such 
service, if your one main desire is that you should be 
yourself good and happy, in order that others may be the 
better and the happier for you — in one word, if you recog- 
nize that you are not your own, but are God's child, and 
must therefore by living for others do His work — then 
fear not ; this is at least the dawn which shall broaden 
and brighten into the boundless day. It shall never be 
yours to cry in disappointment with the dying Brutus : 
" Oh virtue, thou art but a name ! " Nay, more, you may 
fearlessly claim the gradual fulfilment of the divine 
beatitude, "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst 
after righteousness : for they shall he filled." For 
observe, my brethren, there are some — alas ! there are 
many — in the world who seem to hunger and thirst after 
nothing. It is a type which in this age is getting more 
and more common, the type of those who live as though 
they had no souls, as though no God had made them, 
no Saviour died for them, no Spirit shone in the temple 
of their hearts. They live but little better than the 
beasts that perish, the life of dead, stolid, spiritless 
comfort, the life without purpose, without effort, without 
nobility, without enthusiasm, " the dull, grey life, and 
apathetic end." The great sea of human misery welters 
around them ; but what is that to them, while the bread 
is given and the water sure ? Over them, vast as the 
blue dome of Heaven, brood the eternal realities ; before 
them, deeper than ever plummet sank, flows the river 
of death ; beyond it, in gloom unutterable or in beauty 
that cannot be described, is either the outer darkness or 
the City of our God ; but it seems as though they had 
neither mind to imagine, nor faith to realize, nor heart 
to understand. These are they whom in his awful 



in.] THIRSTING AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS, 25 

vision the great poet of the Middle Ages saw whirled 
like the autumn leaves, round and round the outer 
circle of the prison-house, aimlessly following the 
nutter of a giddy flag, hateful alike to God and to His 
enemies, whom, in his energetic language, Heaven de- 
spises and Hell itself rejects. These are they of whom, 
in language no less energetic and intense, the divine poet 
of the Apocalypse exclaims : " I know thy works, that 
thou art neither cold nor hot : I would thou wert cold or 
hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold 
nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." It is sad, 
but it is true, that they are nothing, they do nothing, 
they learn nothing, they add nothing to the sum of human 
happiness — numerics etfruges consumere nati ; their lives, 
one had well nigh said, worth less to humanity than the 
very flower that grows upon their graves. Oh ! be not 
you like these. Be something in life, do something, 
aim at something ; not something great, but something 
good; not something famous, but something service- 
able; not leaves, but fruit. You are planted in the 
vineyard of God, you are watered by the dews of 
Heaven ; let the great Husbandman not look in vain, 
when He looketh that ye bring forth grapes ; for if not, 
then lo ! even now, in the hands of the watchers and 
the holy ones, the lifted axe may be swinging through 
the parted air, even now the dread fiat be issuing 
forth : " Cut it down ; why cumbereth it the ground ? " 

2. But there are others who hunger and thirst indeed, 
but it is not for righteousness ; hunger and thirst, oh, 
how fiercely, oh, with what futile pain, spending their 
money for that which is not bread, and their labour for 
that which satisfieth not. Some — hundreds — like 
Balaam, are greedy of gain, and if they succeed, then 
all that they touch seems to turn to gold, and, like 



26 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

the foolish king of the legend, they starve in the midst 
of it. Or they are greedy of sensual pleasure, they 
rush madly to the " scoriae river of passion," and consume 
their very beings with draughts of its liquid fire. Or 
they axe greedy of power and fame, and chase those 
dancing bubbles till at a touch they burst, while, with 
the echoes of mocking laughter, they themselves fall 
through some sudden gap of death into the rolling waters 
of the prodigious tide below. Over and over again, in 
book after book, in age after age, does Scripture warn 
us of the emptiness, the unsatisfactoriness of human 
wishes ; . it compares them to the vanishing brooks 
dried up in the summer heat, when they arc needed 
most ; it compares them to broken cisterns which will 
hold no water. A modern army was once crossing a 
desert, scorched with heat, agonized with thirst; suddenly 
before them gleamed lakes and rivers, green with their 
grassy margins, bright with the soft inversion of reflected 
trees. They pressed forward in their weary hunger, in 
their raging thirst ; warned in vain that it was but a 
mocking phantom, they pressed forward only to be un- 
deceived with double anguish ; they pressed forward to 
find nothing but the circle of sun-encrimsoned wilder- 
ness, nothing but the glare of illuminated sand. They 
had seen that mirage which is the truest type of the 
devil's promise and the worldling's hope, the false 
spectre of waters which are not, and of fruits that fail, — 
that mirage of the desert, which is but too apt to deceive 
us all, till death disenchants the dreaming eyes. 

3. But " blessed are they that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness : for they shall be filled ; " filled with the 
heavenly manna of which he that gathered least had 
yet no lack, sated w T ith the water which he who drink- 
eth shall thirst no more. There is no false glamour, 



in.] THIRSTING AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS. 27 

no raging hunger, no scorching thirst in those green 
pastures, beside those still waters, whither God leadeth 
His children's feet. The voice of Scripture, which warns 
us so often of the perils of being deceived by dangerous 
desires, tells us also again and again that the kingdom 
of heaven is righteousness, and joy, and peace. " Great 
is the peace," sang David, " which they have who love 
Thy law." " Her ways," said Solomon, " are ways of 
pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." But if any 
doubt, I will not ask them to believe on the testimony 
of Scripture only. Scripture is but one of God's revela- 
tions, and none of His revelations can contradict each 
other. But take in hand the unsuspected page of 
history ; read the rich volumes of biography ; decipher 
the tablets of conscience as the light of God's law falls 
full upon them : will they contradict the warning ? will 
they alter the advice ? Nay, let the best-read here find 
me in all the history of the dead, point to me among all 
the myriads of the living, but one single man, be he the 
most gifted, the most successful, the most superior, who 
has been satisfied and supported by what earth can 
give, or who, having eaten the fruits of sin, has not 
found them venomous and bitter ; or, on the other hand, 
one single man, be he the very poorest and most despised, 
who, having with his whole soul sought righteousness, 
has not thereby been fully satisfied, infinitely content — 
find me, I say, but one permanently happy worldling, 
but one permanently miserable Christian, and I will 
admit that Scripture errs. But, my brethren, you 
cannot, even with all the records of the ages and all the 
literature of the godless to aid your search. Wickedness, 
even exalted on the throne, even robed in the purple, 
even lolling at the feast, is gnawed by the secret vipei 
at the heart ; righteousness, even lurking in the 



28 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

catacomb, even tortured in the dungeon, even quivering 
in the flame, rejoiceth in its deepest sorrow, and is 
assurance, and life, and peace. 

Observe, we do not pretend to offer you a life of 
unbroken prosperity or of undisturbed repose. Kight- 
eousness will give you love, joy, peace ; but it will not 
give you an invincible amulet against misfortune, or a 
continuous immunity from pain. Pain, bereavement, 
failure may be the needful fire to purge away the dross 
of your nature from the seven-times refined gold. Let 
Satan tempt you with the transient spasms of enjoyment 
or the mean baits of ease : the service of God disdains 
such lower allurements. Yes, the path of evil is broad, 
and smooth, and downwards, and near at hand ; but 
toil stands in the path of righteousness, and that path 
is narrow, and steep, and rough ; but who would ex- 
change its saddest sigh for the laughter of fools, which 
is as the crackling of thorns under a pot ? Who would 
exchange the tears which God's hand shall wipe away 
for "the troubles of the envious or the fears of the 
cowardly, the heaviness of the slothful, or the shame of 
the unclean ? " Nay, who would exchange the banquet 
of the prodigal at its maddest and most luxurious 
moment for the sternest duty and the heaviest affliction 
of his Father's home ? Whatever happens to you, if 
you hunger and thirst after righteousness, you shall be 
satisfied ; for then your hunger is not for the stones of 
the wilderness, but for the tree of life ; your thirst not 
for poisoned fountains, but for the river pure as crystal 
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 
For you that tree was planted ; for you that river 
flows : Christ is the river of living water ; Christ is 
that tree of life. "All things are yours, and ye are 
Christ's, and Christ is God's." Young as you are, 



in.] THIRSTING AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS. 29 

have you never thirsted for something to calm, and 
satisfy, and give peace to your souls? "Well, he that 
cometh to Christ shall never hunger, and he that 
believeth on Christ shall never thirst. And if you 
have failed to win that blessing, may there not be a 
special meaning for you in that appeal, " Oh that thou 
hadst hearkened to my commandments ; then had thy 
peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the 
waves of the sea " ? But if you have hearkened to God's 
commandments — if you have at least striven to hearken 
to God's commandments — then you see that what God 
gives He gives richly, He gives abundantly. It is no 
dribbling rivulet of peace which He pours into the 
thirsty soul, but a rejoicing river ; no transitory torrent, 
but an abounding tide ; rising in His children as water 
rises in a fountain, dwelling in them as water dwelleth 
in a mighty sea. This is His promise, and, if we fulfil 
its conditions, it can never fail ; for the mouth of God 
hath spoken it, and God is true. 

May 7, 1871. 

J 



^Jepartmenb 
of the -.Hop, 



SERMON IV. 
THE EIGHT USE OF SPEECH. 

Matt. xii. 36. 

■* I say unto you that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall 
give account thereof in the day of judgment." 

Guided by the lessons of each Sunday, we have striven 
to think together over the great truths of our belief ; to 
cleanse, to strengthen, to uplift our souls by the awful 
verities of death, judgment, and eternity. But such 
thoughts are worse than useless if they produce no 
effect upon our lives. The test of their reality is not 
the idle leafage of profession, but the rich certainty of 
fruit. The tree of life beside the pure river bare twelve 
manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month. 
What are those fruits ? They are the golden apples of 
each fair virtue. To the consideration of one such 
virtue our Lord's words to-day invite us ; a single virtue, 
but manifold in its operation — that high virtue which 
consists in the right use of -speech. 

Our life, like the fancies of our sleep, is blended of 
the intermingling realities of the unseen and the seen. 
All of us live two lives in one : the outward, temporal, 
accidental life of routine and circumstance; and that 
inward, invisible life, which is unlimited by time or 
space, which can either soar into the heaven of heavens, 



serm. iv.] THE BIGHT USE OF SPEECH. 31 



gaze undazzled upon the very throne of God, and move 
untrembling, the Arm that moves the world ; or which, 
sinking downwards into the very deepest and deadliest 
abysses, can dwell familiarly in the evil darkness, with 
all monstrous and prodigious things. And this inner 
and outer life are often wholly disparate ; in some men 
they brighten and fade into alternate prominence and 
oblivion ; in some the outer life is all, the inner nothing; 
in some the inner is the awful reality, the outer but a 
passing and inconsiderable dream. And again, the 
relations between these two lives often wholly differ. 
In some the outer life is false — a mere hypocrisy ; a 
whitened sepulchre covering the deep uncleanness ; a 
fair face hiding the inward leprosy; the network of 
sunbeams over a treacherous and turbid sea. In some 
this outer life is not false but inadequate ; it fails 
somehow to express and reflect the inward goodness ; it 
creates an unjust prejudice, like the rough robe that 
conceals a king, or the stained fringe of the shallow 
waves that are so poor an outcome of the mighty sea. 
And there are some again — oh happy they ! — whose two 
lives, the outer and the inner, are mutually expressive, 
exquisitely harmonious. 

" How sour sweet music is," 
sings our great poet, 

" When time is broke, and no proportion kept ; 
So is it with the music of men's lives." 

And the outer lives of these of whom I speak are, as it 
were, a sacrament : the outward and visible sign of an 
inward and spiritual grace given unto them. In them, 
by God's blessing, there is no painful dislocation between 
the thing that they weakly approve and the thing they 



32 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

basely do ; their outward life is calm and holy, because 
their inward life is inviolate and pure. 

The soul of a bad man, or a worldly man, may, I 
suppose, in course of time die down to the ground ; may, 
as it were, be eaten out of him by lusts and cares, and 
then he can scarcely be said to have an inner life at all ; 
but for all save these, the inner life is the real being, 
as the soul is the truest self; and this is the object of 
what I have been saying — our genuine words are the 
shadows of our souls. None can read our thoughts ; 
none can see our souls ; but when the lips speak, then 
that which is within us is revealed, revealed for ever. 
The pulses of articulated air may pass away from the 
cognisance of the senses, but as no motion can ever 
wholly cease, they quiver in that sensitive medium 
until the end ; and even were it not so, yet for every 
idle word we speak, we shall, for Christ's own lips have 
said it, be called to account upon the judgment day. 
" Then," says the prophet Malachi, " they that feared 
the Lord spake often to one another, and the Lord 
hearkened and heard it, and a book of remembrance 
was written before Him for them that feared the Lord 
and thought upon His name." And is there no other 
book of remembrance, a book of remembrance which 
must also be a book of condemnation ? Do you think 
that those who have willingly defied God's laws, even 
if they die splendid and prosperous in the scarlet 
fruitage of their sins, do you think that they have 
escaped the Divine justice ? Ah no ; there is many a 
word of thine written on those awful pages, and by thy 
words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou 
shalt be condemned. Evil thoughts are deadly and 
dangerous, but they are less guilty than evil words, less 
guilty than evil deeds ; they are the sparks which may 



iv.] THE EIGHT USE OF SPEECH, 33 

indeed, at any moment burst into flame ; and the spark 
may be trodden out while it is yet a spark ; but who 
shall stay the raging conflagration ? Yet evil thoughts 
are full of peril, and if all our sins of thought were but 
written upon our foreheads, there would be dire need 
for us to stand with bowed heads and downcast eyes as 
we await the verdict before the solemn bar ; yet if we 
have conquered them as thoughts, then far less will be 
the wrong that we have done, far less damning will be 
the witness of our accusing consciences against our- 
selves. But every word we speak falls on the ears of 
others ; and who shall brave the witness of others against 
him ? " Words, words, words," it has been exclaimed, 
"good and bad, loud and soft, millions in the hour, 
innumerable in the day, unimaginable in the year : — 
what then in the life ? What in the history of a 
nation ? What in that of the world ? And not one of 
them is ever forgotten. There is a book where they are 
all set down." 1 Oh let the thought add dignity, add 
solemnity, add truthfulness, add absolute and perfect 
purity, add sacred and illimitable charity to all we 
say! 

Let us then consider briefly and imperfectly, for 
more is not possible in the time before us — some of our 
duties and some of our dangers — for the two are 
correlate — in the use of speech. What classes of' idle 
words must we avoid ? You will, I think, find that 
they fall mainly under four heads: words that sin 
against truth, against reverence, against purity, against 
Christian love ; our duty is to see that all our words be 
holy words, true words, clean words, charitable words ; 
our effort, if herein we would live nobly, should be to 
avoid all impurity, all impiety, all malice, and all lies. 

1 Dean Alford. 
M. S. D 



34 IN THE DAYS OF TRY YOUTH. [serm. 

1. Let us take words of falsehood first. In all ages, 
pagan no less than heathen, from the old poet who sang 

" "Who dares think one thing, and another tell, . 
My soul detests him as the gates of hell," 1 

down to the living one who exclaims 

11 This is a shameful thing for men to lie," 2 

the best and loftiest of mankind have ever been the 
most incisive in branding the sin of lies. There is 
something specially contemptible in the cowardice, the 
treachery, the meanness of this sin ; the trail of the 
serpent is peculiarly upon it ; even men of the world 
are sickened by it. A man of honour could not tell a 
lie even if he would : in uttering it he would be unable 
to repress the rising gorge of self-disgust ; the blush of 
his indignant honesty would burn through the smooth, 
false visage of deceit. But though I trust that there 
are but very few of us who need to be warned against 
positive open lies, may we not all aim at more absolute 
and perfect accuracy ? aim never to colour any state- 
ment, however slight, by our interests or our wishes ? 
aim not only to speak the truth always, but always also 
the whole truth and nothing else ? And although I know 
that there are scarcely any of you who would tell a 
deliberate lie, let me warn you, my young brethren, 
against acting one ; against little concealments, against 
little dissimulations, against little dishonesties, against 
little deceits. In form, for instance, the surreptitious 
leaf, the dishonest aid, the copied exercise, the note 
written in school: these are the fruitful sources of 
temptation ; and therefore, if you would be perfectly 
honest, never pretend to be doing what you are not 
1 Homer. 2 Tennyson, Morte d' Arthur. 



XIBRAtfF 




iv.] THE RIGHT USB ( 

^- 

doing ; never pretend to have done what you have not 
done ; never be surprised into a concealment or startled 
into a falsehood ; such " manslaughter on truth " always 
ends in murder. Excuse develops into subterfuge; 
subterfuge degenerates into equivocation ; equivocation 
ends in lies. If you set a stone rolling on a mountain 
it acquires at every moment a more and more hideous 
velocity and force ; and so many a boy, suddenly charged 
with some trivial wrong, suddenly detected in some 
venial fault, suddenly afraid of some insignificant 
punishment (oh, whenever such a thing occurs to you, 
pause, and think, and keep your lips as it were with a 
bridle, before you speak !) — yes, even a boy of natural- 
honour has often ere now found himself landed in the 
shame, found ' himself branded with the stigma, of 
distinct and undeniable falsehood. We may hate lies 
and abhor them ; but depend upon it, only by God's 
grace and our own careful watchfulness are any of us 
safe from anything. And oh, knowing that we may, in 
violation of our own real and truest nature, become false 
by carelessness, by timidity, even by a mere social 
assentiveness and wretched complaisance, let us draw 
for ourselves a deep and severe boundary line herein. 

"My sin, Ismenius, hath wrought all this ill, ,J 

says an old dramatist; 

"And I bevseech thee to be warned by me, 
Ana do not lie if any man do ask thee 
But how thou dost, or what it is o'clock : 
Be sure thou do not lie— make no excuse ; 
For they above (that are entirely truth) 
"Will' make the seed that thou hast sown of lies 
Yield miseries a hundred-thousand-fold 
Upon thy head, as they have done on mine. " 

2. About the idle words of irreverence I shall say but 
little. Common as is the senseless vice of profanity — 

d2 



36 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

a profanity caused in the uneducated by mere brutal 
ignorance, and in others by an imitative weakness or 
petty irascibility — I venture to hope and to believe that 
by God's blessing it is not in its worst forms common 
among you. How can it be common among Christian 
boys ? But if any one of you is in the habit of using 
oaths, I rede his sleeping conscience to beware of their 
guilt and folly. This futile gratuitous insult against 
sacred names and solemn truths is nothing more or less 
than the mere vulgarity of guilt. It is a sign of mental 
imbecility and social ill-breeding, no less than of moral 
death. Other sins offer at least some ghastly simulacrum 
of a pleasure, or some poor excuse of a temptation ; this 
sin of swearing offers none. What ? to use the name of 
God, and of God's most dread judgments, in the mere 
riotous intemperance of brainless speech; to fling about 
thoughts so dread that they should be immured " like the 
garden of Eden with the swords of the cherubim," and 
to prostitute them into petulant curses or idle expletives 
— one hardly knows whether most to admire the stupidity 
of such a degradation or to detest ^its guilt. But 
remember that there are other, and alas ! far commoner 
ways of taking God's word in vain. You may take it 
in vain by the irreverent utterance of a petition, by the 
empty repetition of a creed, by the undevotional singing 
of a hymn : you may take it in vain as you read a 
lesson in chapel, or say a grace in hall — ay, take it in 
vain, though the lips move not, as you join in acts of 
adoration and listen to words of prayer. Oh, let there 
be reverence among us for sacred things ; and here in 
this chapel, by deep silence, by the thoughtful attention, 
by the reverend attitude, by the hearty and devout re- 
sponse, may you learn that humble and holy fear which 
shall make all carelessness about the name or the 



iv.] THE BIGHT USE OF SPEECH. 37 

thought of God impossible to you henceforth for 
ever. 

3. But commoner by far than the idle words of false- 
hood, and the idle words of irreverence, are the idle 
words of uncharity : and though it would be impossible 
to dwell upon them now, whose conscience does not 
accuse him here ? Ill-nature, gossip, spite, malice, 
slander, whispering, backbiting, detraction, calumny, 
alas ! the multitude of the names, — and I have not half 
exhausted them, — proves the prolific danger of the 
thing. Yes, there are " the unknown voices that bellow 
in the shade and swell the language of falsehood and of 
hate;" there is "the diseased noise and scandalous 
murmur V of petty criticism ; there is the thick scum of 
city loquacity, and the acrid jealousies of provincial 
sloth. Among you, I doubt not, there is all the petty, 
ignoble, seething tittle-tattle of constant and promis- 
cuous talk. These things do not all spring from wicked 
bitterness, they are not all the symptoms of the empty 
head and the corrupted heart; sometimes they are 
simply the offspring of intellectual feebleness trying to 
seem clever by the attempt at satire ; sometimes a mere 
effort of those who are weary of themselves and envious 
of others, to break what has been called " the pattering 
monotony of life ; " sometimes a sort of disappointed 
egotism, and morbid self-conceit, because 

" It's always ringing in their ears, 
1 They call this man as good as me.' " 

But whatever it be, it becomes a disease. It makes the 
mind like those looking-glasses in the temple of Smyrna 
which gave a false and distorted reflection even of 
every innocent and happy face that looked upon them. 
It is a great curse to the possessor — this mocking, carping, 
detracting, grumbling spirit ; men please it not, nor 



38 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

women neither ; it makes us, like that ancient satirist, 
the natural product of a corrupt and decadent civilisa- 
tion, who lets his tongue " rage like a fire among the 
noblest names, defaming and defacing," 

" Finding low motives unto noble deeds, 
Fixing all doubt upon the darker side, " 

until to him n@t even Helen was beautiful or Achilles 
brave. 1 Kind words, and liberal estimates, and generous 
acknowledgment, and ready appreciation, and unselfish 
delight in the excellences of others — these are the 
truest signs of a large intellect and a noble spirit : 
while proneness to discover imperfection, and love of 
finding fault, and exultation in dwelling upon failure, 
and fondness for inflicting pain, are the certain marks 
of an unchristian temper and an ignoble heart. 

4. On the fourth and last class of idle words — words 
of impurity — I shall scarcely even touch. More 
criminal even than irreverence, more degrading even 
than falsehood, more pestilent even than slander — oh, if 
there be a sin which needs " the fiery whip of an exter- 
minating angel," it is the sin of those who degrade one 
of the highest gifts of God to do the vilest office of His 
enemies. What should we think of one who smeared 
the walls of a city with the elements of plague ? what 
of him who on the most dangerous headlands kindled, 
of purpose, the wrecker's fire ? Yet even he would be 
doing the devil's work less obviously and less perilously 
than he who, into the ear of another, pours the leperous 
distilment of his own most evil thoughts. The influence 
of such words is truly baleful ; their effects often 
terribly permanent. They paint the soul's inmost 
chambers with unhallowed imagery ; they break on its 

1 Lucian. 



.v.] THE EIGHT USE OF SPEECH 39 

holiest memories with satanic songs. The troubled sea, 
when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and 
dirt — raging waves, foaming out their own shame — such 
are the Scripture metaphors for these. And from all 
such — from all such, more and rather than from every 
other class of the sinful — from their words that eat as 
doth a canker, from the contagion of their presence, 
from the infection of their touch, from the contamination 
of their very look — from all such may God mercifully 
preserve the school we love ! 

Oh, then, my brethren — and above all you who are 
now about so soon to renew with your own lips your 
ba/ptismal vow — make for yourselves, in conclusion, at 
least this one resolution — that you will set a watch 
before the door of your mouth. Let no oath, no privy 
slandering, no corrupt communication, no word that is 
not true, ever again cross or sully those lips that, more 
surely than with a living coal from the altar, have been 
hallowed by the utterance of a Christian vow. Against 
meanness, profanity, pollution, let there henceforth be 
an impassable barrier there. And let all of us strive, 
more earnestly and more continuously, after the dignity 
of severer speech. If we cannot otherwise trust our- 
selves, then, — from all morbid egotism, from all un- 
generous depreciation — let us take refuge in that 
silence which, under such circumstances, is a better 
thing than speech, being innocent as childhood, and 
"harmless as a breath of woodbine to the passer-by/' 
Better to be silent, and silent for ever, than to speak 
words false, or uncharitable, or impure. And some there 
are — some still among the living — who, because their 
spirits are always walking like white-robed angels 
among the white-robed companies on high — because 
their eyes and their thoughts are among the stars and 



40 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. iv. 

not upon the dust, who, because they gaze upon the 
golden brow of humanity and not upon its feet of clay 
— who, because they look upon their fellows with the 
larger, other eyes of sunny, genial, loving natures, speak 
no words now that are not pure, and sweet, and noble, 
and charitable, and kind. Oh, may we learn to be like 
theip, for the Saints of God are these, though no visible 
aureola gleam as yet around their brow ! Nay rather, 
may we be like Him, who, though He loved us so much 
that for our sakes He emptied Himself of His glory, 
and became obedient unto death, even the death of the 
Cross, yet gave His solemn warning that for every idle 
word that men shall speak, shall they give account at 
the judgment day. 

May, 17, 1871. 



SERMON V. 

SMOULDERING LAMPS. 

Matt. xxv. 8. 
"Our lamps are gone out." 

There is much to say, and but little time to say it in. 
We must feel that often ; we must feel it especially on 
an occasion such as this, when, besides the ordinary 
Sabbath quietude and Sabbath prayer, there is triple 
reason why to-day we should call this Sabbath a 
delight, holy of the Lord, honourable. 

1. In the first place it is Whit-Sunday, the White 
Sunday, the birthday of the Christian Church. And 
remember that what we commemorate to-day is not only 
the sound as of a rushing mighty wind, and the shaken 
house where tloid Apostles were assembled, and the 
saintly foreheads, each mitred with its cloven flame — not 
only the Gift of Tongues, and the Word of God shining 
like the lightning from East to West — not only the 
burning words of Peter and the first great harvest of 
regenerated souls : historic reminiscences like these may 
become dim with time and overshadowed with unreality 
— but we commemorate the deepest and greatest of 
Christian truths, the presence in our hearts of an in- 
dwelling Spirit, to be the eternal aid to an increasing 



42 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm, 

holiness, to be the eternal witness of an unshaken faith. 
On other days we thank God for the gift of some special 
blessing, to-day we thank Him for the imparting of 
Himself, not only into our nature, as on Christmas Day, 
not only into our death as on Good Friday, but the gift 
of Himself into our hearts. This is the very noontide 
of the Christian day — a noontide without an evening — 
a day on which no night need ever more descend. 

2. But further, this is not only Whit-Sunday, but to 
many of you also the first Sunday after your confirmation. 
In infancy, even at the tenderest dawn of life, you were 
brought to the arms of Christ, and there with " a few 
calm words of faith and prayer," and " a few bright 
drops of holy dew," you were signed with the sign of the 
cross, in token that hereafter you should not be ashamed 
to fight manfully under Christ's banner, and to be His 
faithful soldier and servant unto your life's end. In 
the ancient Church, and even down to the Eeformation, 
another significant ceremony was added ; the child was 
clothed by the minister in a white robe, called the 
chrisom robe, as a sign that he was washed from sinful 
defilements and had put on Christ, while the words 
were used, " Take this white vesture as a token of the 
innocency which by this Holy Sacrament of Baptism is 
given unto thee, and as a sign whereby thou art admon- 
ished, so long as thou livest, to innocency of living, 
that after this transitory life thou mayest be a partaker 
of life everlasting." And though in no earthly vestry, 
yet amid the eternal treasuries, that chrisom robe of 
innocence is laid up as a mute witness against you. 
For then as a river rises, pure as crystal, among the 
moss of some green mountain side, even so your life 
began ; then were those bright and happy years in the 
dear old home when you were taken in the arms of God's 



v.] SMOULDERING LAMPS. 43 

holy ones, and knelt in prayer beside His saints ; the 
days of every redeeming grace, of every softening virtue, 
of every refining and purifying influence, of every sacred 
and tender memory ; the days when your innocent heart 
was a bright temple, wholly God's, when the child folds 
his little white hands as he lisps out of stainless lips his 
holy prayers, and when as night by night he lies down in 
his little cot, the angels of God close to the doors of his 
happy heart, and weave under his curtained eye the 
radiant fantasies of untroubled sleep. Yes that was 

" Before we knew to fancy aught 
But a white celestial thought, 
Before we taught our tongues to wound 
Our conscience with a guilty sound ; 
But felt through all this earthly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness. " 2 

And if indeed the river of your life have been stained 
since then by any of the bitter soils through which its 
course has run, yet now once more have you been 
affectionately urged, gently aided, to calm and cleanse 
the turbid waves. Surely on the first Sunday after your 
confirmation you feel, all of you, the richer, the holier, 
the happier. You have experienced, I trust, already 
that God's Holy Spirit can indeed, if you rightly seek 
Him, draw His sevenfold veil between you and the 
fires of youth ; and with the shadow upon your heads 
of the hand that blessed, you have been strengthened 
to take your stand boldy and nobly on the side of all 
that is great and true. Oh, that on this day He would 
indeed outpour upon each youthful head the crysmal 
fires of His sevenfold gifts ; and if, indeed, any of you 
have sinned and fallen and desecrated His temple ; if 
in any of your hearts have been the spirit of folly and 

1 H. Yaughan. 



44 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

blindness, the spirit of ignorance and effeminacy, the 
spirit of forgetfulness and self-indulgence, and the spirit 
of evil defiance against His law, oh, may He henceforth 
grant you instead, and grant you 'richly, according to 
the prayer we prayed, the spirit of wisdom and under- 
standing, the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the 
spirit of knowledge and true godliness, and the spirit of 
His holy fear. 

3. And once again, this, not only a Whit-Sunday, 
not only the first Sunday after your confirmation, is to 
many of you ever-memorable as the day of your first 
Communion, the day on which you are first admitted to 
the highest privilege of the Christian's life. Coming 
immediately after your confirmation, and henceforth 
continually, until it be, as it were, the very viaiicum at 
your journey's close, what a blessing, my brethren, 
may this be to you : at the most solemn crisis of youth 
a gracious reminder of all that Christ your Saviour has 
done for you, and all that you have vowed for Him — at 
the most dangerous period of life a living Sacrament, 
the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual 
grace — when the passions are strongest and pleasure 
wears its most falsely-destructive smile — a fresh call to 
repentance and self-devotion, a fresh grace of strength 
and purity, a fresh stimulus to charity and faith and 
prayer. 

And I doubt not that, all this being so, there is some 
gleam of brightness in the saddest heart among you all. 
How shall I aid you to feel it permanently, to feel it 
increasingly, to feel it even until the end ? For alas ! 
warm feelings, though happy, are not religion ; and high 
hopes, though inspiring, are not holiness ; and religious 
excitement, though awakening, is not strength. My 
brethren, I cannot, for human opportunities are scanty, 



v.] SMOULDERING LAMPS. 45 

and human words are weak ; but to the Holy Ghost the 
Comforter, who loveth before all temples the upright 
heart and pure, to Him who can send forth His seraphim 
with the fire of His altar to touch and hallow the lips 
of whom He will, — I pray to Him that in this His house, 
on this His day, He would take of the things of Christ 
and show them unto you ; that He would Himself make 
intercession for you with groanings that cannot be 
uttered. 

Let me then take but a single point: let me take 
the imagery of my text, and strive to fix it upon your 
hearts. Into your hands has been put a lighted lamp ; 
into the hand of every one of you the lighted lamp of 
conscience, of the Word of God, of the Spirit of Christ ; 
into the hands of many of you to-day the same lamp, 
indeed, but fed with an oil more fragrant, and burnished 
into a purer gold. 

And when I describe this guiding principle of life as 
a lamp put into your hands, you will recognise at once 
the imagery of Christ's parable, which you heard in the 
evening lesson two days ago ; you will recall that lovely 
and pathetic picture of the bridegroom setting forth to 
his bride's house to bring her home ; of the virgins, her 
companions, awaiting them far on into the starry cool- 
ness of the oriental night ; of their slumber in the 
midnight silence ; of the cry, " Behold, the bridegroom 
cometh;" of the hurry, the alarm, the shame, the 
anguish, when the foolish virgins found that their oil 
was exhausted and their lamps had burned too low. 
And then you will remember how the bridal procession 
passed into the glorious and happy banquet, and the 
door was shut. In vain, with their miserable smoulder- 
ing lamps, they stand, terrified, remorseful, agitated, at 
the closed door and knock. To that wild, eager, 



46 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

importunate knocking, in his festal robes, the garlands 
of rose and myrtle on his brow, the bridegroom came, 
and over his fair presence, through the opening door, 
streamed the echoes of lordly music and the glow of 
odorous lights. But for these foolish virgins there were 
no words of welcome now, and upon their terror-stricken 
hearts sank like heavy snow-flakes the chilly words, 
"I know you not." It was too late. The door was 
shut. It was dark and cold, and the birds of night were 
flitting, and the thick dews fell, and in that chilly 
darkness their lamps were going out. 

Our lamps are being quenched. And, using the same 
metaphor, " Quench not," says the great Apostle of the 
Gentiles, " quench not, put not out the Spirit." Can, 
then, the light of God's holy Spirit be quenched within 
us ? If so, how can that light be quenched ? Whereby 
can it be kept alive ? 

i. Let me answer both questions as briefly and simply 
as I may. And first, the lamp, the light within us, can 
be quenched in two ways : the one active, the other 
passive ; the one by forgetfulness of God, the other by 
familiarity with vice. The bright lamp is in your hands, 
but it can die out if you yield to sloth; it will be 
extinguished if you give yourself to sin. 

By sloth, for instance. Oh, my brethren, set it down 
as a certain fact in the revelation of God's will that 
the life which is content without one effort after 
holiness must be content also without one hope of 
heaven. You know it is so in the physical domain : 
there you cannot attain to excellence without care and 
practice; you know that it is so in the intellectual 
domain — there you cannot win either knowledge or 
distinction without study and self-denial; and think 
you that it shall not be so also in the spiritual domain ? 



v.] SMOULDERING LAMPS. 47 

Think you that there the great victory will be given to 
yawning satiety and drowsy ease ? Should the young 
Greek athlete be content to submit to rough training 
and eat hard fare before he could even hope for his 
withering garland of Isthmian pine ? And shall you 
dream that the crown of life, the wreath of amaranth 
that cannot fade, will be dropped, even unasked for, 
upon the glutton'.* banquet or the sluggard's bed ? Nay, 
but believe me, "the kingdom of Heaven suffereth 
violence, and the violent take it by force.' , Even the 
heathen saw that toil is the janitor at the gate of virtue, 
and that he who would win must strive. 

You have heard that your bodies are temples of the 
Holy Ghost ; but a temple that is not desecrated must 
be tended and adorned. The great city of Ephesus was 
proud to call herself upon her coins the Neco/copo?, "the 
temple-sweeper" of her heathen fane; and will you 
make no effort to cleanse and tend that heart which 
is the living temple of the jne true God ? Oh, if not, 
beware lest the temple of a living God become the 
tomb of a dead soul, and the lamp which now shines 
peacefully within it first wane, then glimmer, then 
expire. 

ii. But more swiftly and more violently than by sloth, 
in yet a deadlier and yet a surer way, may the light of 
God's Holy Spirit be quenched by sin. Oh, thus it is 
that from the temple of the heart the Spirit is driven, 
even as the Prophet saw the rushing splendour of the 
Divine presence as it departed from the polluted shrine, 
first rise high into the air, then retire till it stood over 
the gate of the city, then remove to the hills beyond it, 
then vanish away for ever into the unutterable gloom. 
Oh, thus it is that, as in the doomed cities of old on the 
eve of their destruction, voices are heard as of offended 



48 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm, 

deities, saying to each other in awful accents, Me-ra- 
fiaivco/jLev ivT€v0€v, " Let us depart hence." Oh, my* 
brethren, you who will go forth on the path of life to 
meet the bridegroom, beware but of one conscious, one 
admitted, one unresisted sin. Nothing quenches more 
surely the holy lamp. You may try to think of the sin 
as venial ; you may try to hold each fresh commission 
thereof light; but it is even thus that, star by star, the 
whole heavens fade away from the human soul ; even 
thus that one by one its excellences vanish, its virtues 
faint, its graces cease to shine. As when a man descends 
slowly into some dark mine and carries a taper in his 
hand, and knows that so long as the flame of that taper 
burns bright and clear, so long the atmosphere he 
breathes is safe ; but as he gets lower the flame begins 
to contract and to grow pale, and then to waver, and 
at last, as the foul fog-damps surround and imprison 
it, it becomes but a faint and dwindling flicker, and 
finally, amid the blue and poisonous vapours, expires 
with a foul breath of sickening fume ; even so it is, 
alas ! with him who, from the sunlight of God's coun- 
tenance, descends deeper and deeper — with conscious 
self-surrender, with willing guilt, with impotent, because 
with unresisting will — into the deep, dark underground 
of a besetting sin. 

iii. But, my brethren, we are persuaded better things 
of you, and things that accompany salvation though we 
thus speak. Your lamps, I trust, some of your lamps I 
know, are burning brightly now : brighter from recent 
thoughts, and recent blessings, and recent prayers, 
brightly with holy purposes, brightly with hopeful 
efforts, brightly with strong resolves ; not yours, by the 
grace of God, not yours shall be the sad confession and 
the shameful history of the downward course, the 



v.] SMOULDERING LAMPS. 49 

growing degeneracy, the smouldering lamp ; not yours 
the increasing degradation, the gathering midnight, the 
deepening sleep ; oh, may it not be for any one of you 
to watch in anguish the fungous growths that clog the 
untrimmed wick, or its silvery lustre sinking into 
noxious dimness as the gloom threatens to swallow for 
ever the dying flame. Oh, surely you will be of the 
wise who took with them oil in their vessels with their 
lamps. Prayer, effort, watchfulness, penitence for past 
sin, effort to aid the souls of others : these are the mean3 
of grace which are like fresh oil and fragrant in the 
lighted lamp of a Christian's soul. Each time you kneel 
beside your beds, each time you meet in this chapel, 
each hour of quiet thought in which you go forth to 
meet your Lord, each Sunday spent in a calm and holy 
faith, above all, each Holy Sacrament at which you 
kneel with peace in your penitent cleansed hearts 
towards God and man, these shall widen around you 
the circle of heavenly light, these (and God grant they 
may !) shall so make the lamp beam in the temple of 
your souls that even into its darkest recesses soon no 
evil thing shall dare intrude. Thus shall your care be 

" Fixt and zealously attent 
To fill yotir odorous lamps with deeds of light 
And hope, that reaps not shame. " 

iv. And if any of you need a word of special comfort, 
oh, bear with me while I speak one word of comfort more. 
The lamp, my brethren, in this life never goes quite out. 
The text is mistranslated : it is not " are gone out," but 
u are going out ; " it is not " are quenched," but " are 
being quenched." Not while life lasts does God's Spirit 
desert utterly, finally, irrevocably, the human soul. 
Even the steely-hearted murderess in the splendid 
tragedy has yet this touch of grace, that she loves her 

M. S. E 



50 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. v, 

aged father ; even the adulterous usurper has yet this 
hope, that he can kneel upon his knees. And therefore 
I bid you take courage. Even if in your slothfulness 
the lamp has burned too low, even if in your sinfulness 
it has been all but smothered, yet, oh believe that even 
now there is One who will not quench the smoking flax, 
there is a breath of God which even now, like a stream 
of fire, can rekindle the smouldering flame. To the 
very saddest and most unhopeful of you all to-day, to 
him who has wandered farthest from innocence, to him 
who has fallen deepest into sin, even to him I say — 
yet not I, but the voice of God's own promises — 
My young brother, God's grace is sufficient for thee. 
His Spirit is striving with thee now. Oh despise not 
His gracious influence ; oh reject not His offered love. 
Lo, for thy lost innocence, God offers thee repentance. 
Lo, for the cleansing of thine hidden leprosy, He 
stretches from heaven the finger of a healing hand. 
Lo, for the recovery of thy lost health He holds to thee 
a green leaf from the tree of life. Lo, at this great 
Pentecost He rekindles the dying spirit with His 
descending flame. Courage, my brother; that lamp 
may have burnt low, but it has not yet burnt out. 
iC Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the 
everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of ' 
the earth, fainteth not neither is weary? there is no 
searching of His understanding. He giveth power to 
the faint ; and to them that have no might He increaseth 
strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, 
and the young men shall utterly fail. But they that 
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength ; they 
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run 
and not be weary ; they shall walk and not faint." 
Whitsunday, May 30, 1871. 



SERMON VI. 
ASPICE, PBOSPICE, BESPIGE. 

Phil. iii. 13. 

" Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth 
unto those things which are before. " 

Next Sunday, my brethren, will find this chapel empty 
and silent. Now it contains the beating hearts of many 
worshippers, — the mysterious thoughts, the wandering 
fancies, the solemn hopes, the evanescent gladnesses, 
the sorrowful regrets of some 500 boys; but next 
Sunday it will be untenanted, unless the fancy can give 
life to the sunbeams that play upon its floor; empty 
unless some of that host of God whom Jacob met at 
Mahanaim still find cause to linger and meditate in a 
place which has been, we trust, to many a house of 
God and a gate of heaven. The court, too, and the 
College buildings will be almost melancholy in their 
desertion and silence ; the school-rooms closed, the play- 
ground noiseless, the whole life of the place arrested for 
a time. And we, who, day after day, for more than 
eighteen weeks, have been worshipping here, who have 
strolled about these fields, who in that sunny play- 
ground have felt it almost "a luxury to breathe the 
breath of life/' — we too shall be scattered ; worshipping 

e 2 



52 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

some of us in quiet country churches, lingering some 
of us for health and change by the margin of the 
summer sea, wandering some of us over wood and hill 
in the purple heather and the tall green ferns ; but all 
of us I trust retaining a sense of our duties here, and 
all of us rich in the enjoyment of a rest sweetened by 
innocence and earned by toil. For a time severe tasks 
will be laid aside, examinations over and settled ; you 
will be among the scenes which you have known and 
loved from childhood ; among the bright and happy 
faces of brothers, sisters, friends ; encircled by that 
holy and tender love of father and mother which 
distance cannot abate or time abolish. Oh the sunny 
memories of those long holidays ! Oh the unalloyed 
happiness of the day which welcomes back our boyhood 
to the threshold of its home ! I do not envy the boy 
who is not even now counting up the hoarded treasury 
of those home thoughts, enjoying, by anticipation, 
hours which are among the simplest and sunniest which 
earth shall yield. 

But there is a little pause to-day. To-day for the 
last time shall this congregation meet in this chapel ; 
a few weeks will pass and we shall re-assemble, but 
the congregation which shall then meet here will be the 
same yet not the same ; the river is the same, but the 
wave is different ; different in its constituent elements 
though identical in its continuity of life. This very 
fact preaches to us to-day; it bids us forget those 
things which are behind and reach forth to those that 
are before ; and all that I desire is to articulate its 
unspoken utterance. For to-day is at once a close and 
a beginning. Forecast, meditation, retrospect — these 
are what it demands. Aspice, it seems to say, Prospice, 
Bespice ; look thoughtfully at the present, look forward 



vi.] ASPICE, PBOSPICE, RESPICE. 53 

to the future, look backward at the past ; at the present 
with firm and holy resolution, at the past with humble 
and penitent gratitude, to the future with calm and 
earnest hope. 

Have you ever, my brethren, on some sea-voyage left 
your companions and strolled to the stern, and there 
leant over the taffrail to watch the blue waves gliding 
under you, and the white cliffs fading into the distance, 
and the wastes of untrodden water lengthening in the 
rear ? It is a position eminently provocative of thought. 
Let us in imagination take it to-day. We too are 
voyagers on a broad sea ; some of you as yet have had 
but little experience save of cloudless skies above you, 
and the rippling of white foam about the bows; the 
wind plays with the streamer and swells the sail, and 
under the sunlight the waves before you are flashing into 
gold. But others of us are farther on our way; the 
2^lacidi pellacia ponti deceives us not ; we know that on 
that great sea there are sunken reefs and iron shores ; 
we know that of the ships which traverse it, some, 
alas, founder in the billows, and others split upon the 
rocks : — 

"And where a home hath he 
Whose ship is driving on the driving sea ? 
To the frail bark now plunging on its way, 
To the wild waters shall he turu, and say- 
To the plunging bark or to the salt sea foam, 
You are my home ? " 

Ah no ! iny brethren, the true home for us lies beyond 
these waters ; and oh, the rudder needs a firm hand, and 
the voyage a stout heart, for though short it is often 
perilous and always onward. So then, whatever our 
voyage may hitherto have been when we have gazed 
from the stern together on the shores that fade behind 
us,— and afterwards as we turn away again to look 



54 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

on the misty uncertainties of all that may await 
us in our future course, let us pray that touching 
prayer of the Breton mariners. " Save us, oh God ! 
thine ocean is so large, and our little boat so 
small!" 

I. Bespice, look backward — thankfully, if God have 
been sensibly drawing you nearer and nearer to Him- 
self ; with penitence, and resolve, if you have been 
wandering farther and farther from him ; but in any case, 
not in the vain hope, not in the futile fancy that we can 
regain what once is past. On this mysterious sea of 
time there is no rest, no retrogression. As wave after 
wave ripples past us, as mile after mile of water rushes 
by, they are gone, gone for ever, beyond the power of 
even Omnipotence to recall. The memory of those past 
days may be as a halcyon calming them under its 
brooding plumes, or like the petrel hurrying over them 
with the prophecy of storm ; they may have been tra- 
versed in a direction straight for heaven, or they may 
be separating us more and more widely from the haven 
where we would be, — but they are ours no longer ; they 
belong to eternity ; they belong to God ; they have 
glided into the dark backward, they have been swallowed 
up in the unknown abysm. These years that are past, 
where are they ? This half-year that we are just ending, 
where is it ? Dawn after dawn has broadened into 
noonday ; noonday after noonday has faded into even- 
ing; evening after evening has deepened into night; 
have they left us without a blessing ? Is their memory 
for any one of us a sigh ? It is not so I trust for many 
of us ; but is it so for any ? Is it so for one ? If so, 
be it so ; it cannot now be altered. You may call to 
them, but you will call in vain ; there will be neither 
voice, nor any to answer ; the wealth of empires, the 



vl] ASPICE, PBOSPICE, RE8PICE. 55 

intercession of angels could not recover one wasted hour, 
or recall one vanished day. 

And therefore, because the past is wholly irrevocable, 
therefore at the best there is a sadness in retrospect. 
That must be a very dull heart, or a very sleepy con- 
science, or a very shallow experience, that finds no cause 
for sorrow in " thinking of the clays that are no more." 
None of us, not even the very best, are as holy or as 
noble as we might have been ; many of us are not even 
what we were ; some of us, we must fear, are but the 
miserable changelings of ourselves. Yet, if even the 
best man must feel sorrow and shame in remembering 
how little worthy his life has been, how far he has 
fallen short of his own ideal, how often he has swerved 
from the high laws of duty to God and charity to man, — - 
if, I say, even the best man may feel sorrow, let not 
even the lowest feel despair. Is any one of you, my 
brethren, troubled by the sense of a hitherto ignoble 
life, by sinful thoughts and sinful habits, and the re- 
proaches of a self-condemning heart ? — how shall you 
allay the misery ? St. John tells you, " if our hearts 
condemn us, God is greater than our hearts." St. Paul 
tells you, " Forgetting the things that are behind." You 
may have been very sinful, you may have been deplor- 
ably foolish, you may have been sadly tried : and the 
world can do nothing for you — it has neither a heart to 
pity, nor an arm to save ; but your God has, and in His 
book, and in His works, and in your consciences, you 
may all hear a Voice saying cheerfully, encouragingly, 
very tenderly, to the sinful, " Go and sin no more ; " to 
the foolish, " Seek the wisdom which is from above ; " 
to the sad, " Come unto me all ye that are weary and 
heavy-laden, and I will give you rest;" and, as the 
sweet Voice speaks, a gracious hand holds forth to you 



56 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

a cup of cold water, which is the water of Lethe, the 
river of oblivion of sin repented of, the true mandragora 
for every guilty and sleepless soul. Yes, the retrospect 
of a sinful man or of a sinful boy if it be long-con- 
tinued, if it be morbid, if it be absorbing, becomes 
an evil. Let it not be an evil : let the dead past bury 
its dead. It is Christ's own Voice which says to us, "Let 
the dead bury their dead, follow thou me." Let the time 
past of our lives suffice for folly and for sin. " Forget- 
ting that which is behind," not indeed forgetting its 
mercies, for they may be remembered with eternal 
thankfulness, but forgetting its sinful allurements, 
because they have been displaced by nobler thoughts — 
forgetting its failures, because they may be still repaired, 
— forgetting its guilt, because in Christ's blood it can be 
washed away, — forgetting even its successes, because 
the goal of yesterday should be but our starting-point 
to-day. Whether they speak the language of reproach- 
ful menace, or the language of old temptation, there is 
nothing but peril in listening too long to the voices of 
the past. " Come back," they cry to us, " come back," 
when our course should be onwards : but 

" Back flies the foam, the hoisted flag streams back, 
The long smoke wavers on the homeward track ; 
Back fly, with winds, things which the winds obey : 
The strong ship follows its appointed way." 

II. And therefore Aspice, — having looked at the past 
turn your eyes to the present. Yesterday is yours no 
longer ; to-morrow may be never yours ; but to-day is 
yours, the passing hour yours, the living present yours, 
and in the living present you may stretch forward to 
the things that are before. The metaphor of St. Paul 
is the metaphor of a charioteer in some great race. It 



vi.] A SPICE, PBOSPICE, BESPICE. 57 

may be that from his prison in the Palatine he heard 
the shouts that rang frt>m the Circus Maximus beneath 
him ; it may be that looking through the grated lattice 
he saw the wild-eyed charioteers leaning over their 
steeds with twisted lash. The chariots bounded on amid 
dust and danger, but the racer recked neither of past 
accident nor present toil, while his eye was fixed on the 
goal that seemed to fly before him, and the prize that 
awaited his efforts there. And the quick imagination 
of the brave old prisoner found in these scenes fresh 
comfort for an undaunted heart. His gallant spirit 
could transmute even its trials into gold, as the sun- 
beams fire the sullen pines. Is he chained to a Eoman 
soldier ? — the sword and the breastplate and the helm 
inspire him with the immortal imagery of the armour 
of righteousness ; does he hear the rattle of chariots in 
the shouting course ? chained there by the arm in his 
wretched prison, a weary and decrepit prisoner, awaiting 
his doom of death, he yet remembers that he too is 
running a mighty race, at which the angels are specta- 
tors, and the Agonothetes is God, and in that glorious 
contest for a crown of amaranth he hangs over his 
winged and immortal steeds. Be it so with us ! Life is 
but one passing " now," until with one last " now ! " like a 
clap of thunder, the hour of judgment comes. And, there- 
fore, oh give the present moment w T holly, heartily to 
• your Father in Heaven, now, and at yonder holy table, 
offering yourselves, your souls, and bodies, a reasonable 
lively sacrifice,- — now, in silent prayer consecrating your 
hearts to God. Oh, buy your eternity with this little 
hour. Ex hoc momento, says the famous sundial, and 
there is deep truth in its eloquence of warning, 
pendet cetemitas ! 

III. Aspice, Respice, Prospice. Besides the present, and 



58 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

the past, there is a future. It is indeed a page as yet 
unwritten, but you may determine, every one of you, 
with unerring certainty, what shall be written therein. 
Even now you can make that fair white page for you a 
page of the Book of Life, and, secure in the love of God, 
forgiven by the redemption of Christ, strong in the 
strength of the Spirit, you can, as it were, bid the Angel 
of Record there to inscribe your names. What external 
events shall happen to you in life ? how shall the 
divinity shape the ends that you rough-hew ? You may 
indeed lead happy and comfortable lives, liable only to 
the great danger of settling upon the lees, and so, amid 
the world's gross self-complacencies, suffering your dead 
hearts, in the scornful language of Scripture, to become 
fat as brawn ; or, on the other hand, calamity may burst 
upon you like a deluge, and in His very love to you, and 
in order that He may turn your thoughts to Him, God, 
in the shipwreck of your every earthly fortune, may vex 
you with all His storms. And whether it shall be so 
or not you cannot tell : but one thing you may certify, 
and that is that they shall not change you. You may, 
with God as your guardian, pledge yourself, with un- 
shaken certainty, that never of you shall it be said, in 
the pathetic language of the poet, Dissimiles, hie vir et 
Me puer. You may suffer, but they whom the love of 
God supports in suffering, suffer no longer ; you may 
fail, but for them that strive even defeat is victory. 
There is something sublime in this conviction. Not 
know the future ? Nay, we know it ; if we be Christians 
we know it ; not, indeed, this little future of joys that 
break as the bubble breaks, or of brief afflictions which 
are but for a moment ; not that little future of diseased 
egotisms and contracted selfishness which is not life ; 
but that great future of the single in purpose and the 



vi.] ASPICE, PEOSPICE, EESPICE. 59 

pure in heart, that great future which blooms to 
infinitude beyond the marge of death, — that, if we be 
children of God, we know. For we are pressing forward 
to the mark of the prize of our high calling, and that 
mark we cannot miss, and there it shines for ever before 
us — a crown of life, a crown of glory, a crown that fadeth 
not away. The true Christian need know no fear. Be 
true to yourselves, be true to God, be true to the kindred 
points of heaven and home, and then even the gay 
Epicurean lyrist will tell you, and tell you truly : — 

' ' Si fractus illabatur orbis 
Impavidum ferient ruinse." 

On the steep hill of Difficulty, in the Valley of the 
Shadow, amid the crash of a universe smitten into 
indistinguishable ruin, " Thou shalt keep him in perfect 
peace whose mind is stayed on Thee ! " 

One last word. You are all going home ; may the 
coming weeks of holiday be very happy weeks to us 
all, and may those of us who return, return more faith- 
ful, full of vigour, full of purpose, full of self-denial, 
full of the spirit which recognizes only that life is not 
selfishness but service ; full of the determination to do 
our duty here, and to adorn this our Sparta with loyal, 
energetic, devoted toil. Let your loved ones see that 
the months of absence have been months of progress ; 
gladden their hearts by your gentleness, your honour, 
your modesty, your worth. And what last word shall 
we say to you, dear brethren, who will not return to us? 
to whom this is the last Sunday ; for whom one leaf is 
about to be turned, one volume of their lives to be 
closed for ever ? Here have many of you been led — 
been led by wise and kind hands almost from childhood 
to the threshold of a strong and upright manhood. 



60 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

Here have you been taught and encouraged to act nobly 
and to think purely. You love your school, you are 
grateful to it, you have profited in it, you will endeavour 
to serve it loyally hereafter, you will not leave it without 
an affectionate memory and a quiet tear. Fain would 
you keep with us, but that may not be, and though you 
leave us now, yet our kneeling together at yonder Holy 
Table shall be our pledge that we shall continue united 
in the common noblenesses of life, and the common 
hopes of heaven. Go forth then, my brethren, pass 
forth into the world, and may God's best blessing go 
with you. By the loftiness of your purpose, by the 
manliness of your conduct, by the sincerity of your 
love to God, by the devotion of your service to men, be 
an honour to us in the days to come; leave to all 
Marlborough boys who shall follow you hereafter your 
good names as a legacy, your unstained character as an 
example. We have spoken of life as a voyage, sail 
forth then with the favouring gale of our affections ; we 
too, are sailing with you, and, swept by the same 
current, guided by the same compass, through light, 
through darkness, shall meet in the same haven at the 
last. 

" But oh, blithe breeze ! and oh, great seas ! 
Though ne'er — the present parting o'er — 
On yon wide plain we meet again, 
Oh lead us to yon heavenly shore. 

" One port, methinks, alike we seek, 
One purpose hold, where'er we fare ; 
Oh, bounding breeze ! oh, rushing seas t 
At last, at last, unite us there." 

June 25, 1871. 



SEEMON VII. 

LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKER 

Matt. xxv. 23. 

" His lord said unto him, "Well done, good and faithful servant ; 
thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over 
many things : enter thou into the joy of thy lord." 

Of all the glorious aspects of that holy faith which we 
profess — of all those points of spiritual elevation and 
moral beauty which, to the world's end, shall give it 
such infinite charm for every generous and unselfish 
soul — there is none more noticeable than the fact that 
it allied itself with the world's feebleness, not its 
strength. It was with " the irresistible might of weak- 
ness " 1 that it shook the nations. Herod sat in his 
golden palace at Tiberias in dissolute splendour and 
cruel luxury, but for him Christ had no other notice 
than " Go ye and tell that fox ; " the Pharisees swept 
through the Temple courts in their fringed robes in all 
the haughtiness of a sacerdotal clique; and for them 
Christ had no words but to hurl on their hypocrisy 
the scathing flame of his indignation and rebuke. The 
dreaded Emperor was all-powerful at Eome ; the mighty 
legionaries were encamped on the Danube and the 

' Milton. 



62 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

Ebro ; but- neither to Emperor nor legionary did Christ 
appeal. For pride — for cruelty — for scornful laughter — 
for insolent lust — He had nothing but the thunder : but 
for all that suffers— for all that is humble — for all that 
is faithful — for all that is oppressed — He had an infinite, 
unfathomable, all-embracing love. To the one He was 
wrathful as the whirlwind : to the otter gentle as the 
summer breeze. He loved those whom none had loved 
before ; He loved them as none had loved before. He 
loved the poor : He loved the sick : He loved the 
ignorant : He loved children : He loved sinners ; 1 and 
among sinners, He, the friend of sinners, loved most 
those who had suffered most — those who were most 
worthy of His divine compassion — the feebler sex and 
the feebler age — little ones who were tempted — women 
who had sinned. 

It is in the great Eoman poet a topic of praise that 
his philosophic husbandman had neither pitied the 
poor nor envied the rich — 

" Nee ille 
Aut doluit miserans inopem aut invidit habenti. " 

But Christ did pity the poor, for He had been poor 
Himself. Born in the manger of Bethlehem, his youth 
and manhood had found their homes in the shop of the 
carpenter at Nazareth, and the hut of the fisher at 
Bethsaida. Let the world's insolent philosophers go 
learn of Him. They kindled their poor faded torches 
at His light, and they boast that they can illuminate the 
world. It was not they, but Christ, who emancipated 
our race from the dull fascination of wealth, and the 
abject flattery of power. It was not they but He who 
taught the inherent dignity of man— who showed that 

1 See Dupanloup, Vie cle Notre Seigneur. 



vii.] LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKED. 63 



man was to be honoured for being simply man, and that 
his nature, if undebased by sin, may, in the humblest 
child who was ever born, be great with all the greatness 
of virtue, and awful with all the awfulness of im- 
mortality. The " Tu, homo, tantum nomen, si te scias," 
of St. Augustine, — the " We are greater than we know/' 
of Wordsworth — are not the exultant utterance of 
philosophic heathens, but of humble Christians ; they 
were learnt not in the schools of Confucius or of 
Zoroaster — not in the groves of Academe, or in the 
monasteries of Sakya Mouni, — but at the feet of Him 
who did not blush to sit at the banquet of the publican 
— who shrank not from the white touch of the leper, 
and felt no pollution from the harlot's tear. 

The life, the teaching, the very incarnation of Christ 
were all meant to impress upon us this awrful and elevat- 
ing truth : that " each man is as great as he is in God's 
sight and no greater;" that God distributes His earthly 
gifts differently, yet loves His children all alike. 
Surely this is a thought full of consolation for you and 
for all the vast, obscure, nameless, insignificant mul- 
titude. We are not kings, or great men, or mighty 
men, not rich, or powerful, or renowned; no: but 'Ov 
7rpocrG)7roX^7rT779 6 0eo?. God is no respecter of persons. 
How can He be ? before Him all mankind is but as the 
small dust of the balance. Is it anything to the ocean 
whether one foam-speck be larger or smaller, of those 
that float on its illimitable breast ? can there be any 
gradations or eminences in the infinitely little ? No. 
A king dies, and the great bells toll, and the long pro- 
cessions stream, and the gaiety of nations is eclipsed, 
but to the great God before whom his soul passes in all 
its nakedness he is of no more import than the little 
nameless outcast who dies in the city street without a 



64 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

friend. let us thank God that He has taught us to 
reverence ourselves : let us thank God that in His sight 
all are equally great, all equally little. Be it true that 
we are but of the smallest consequence to the world in 
which we live ; that when we die few will hear of it ; 
and there shall be but a few tears in a few [faithful 
eyes, but not in many, and not for long, and then the 
unbroken ripple of human life shall flicker onward in 
the sunshine, and in a few years our very names be 
illegible, as the lichen eats out their crumbling letters 
on the churchyard stone. Ay so ! — but our souls shall 
be as safe, shall be as immortal, in God's holy keeping 
as though our ashes had been entombed in pyramids or 
inurned in gold. To God nothing is common, nothing 
is obscure; to God everything is sacred, everything 
precious, if it fulfil its appointed functions in His great 
design. 

" Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain 
Hath its own mission. 
The very shadow of an insect's wing, 
For which the violet cared not while it stayed, 
Yet felt the lighter for it vanishing, 
Proves that the sun was shining by its shade." 

And can we — drops from the eternal fountain — shadows 
of the living light — can we have been made for nought ? 
No ; the only real, the only permanent, the only essential 
greatness open to man is that of duty and of goodness ; 
and that is as open, is as free, is as possible to every 
man as the sunlight that shines on us, or as the sweet 
air we breathe. 

These lessons, my brethren, spring immediately from 
this parable of the talents, from which our text is taken, 
which you have just heard read to you in the second 
lesson of to-day. That parable contains of course far 
more than we can exhaust ; is rich in many other great 



vii.] LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKED. 65 



and important lessons on which we cannot touch; it 
shows that all that we have is received from God — is 
not a thing to be haughtily valued but humbly cherished, 
seeing that it is not our own but given ; it shows to us 
that the object, the sole object, of all the talents we 
receive is not self-glorification, but use and service ; bitt 
it shows also the lesson on which I have hitherto dwelt, 
that God values us not for the splendour or amount of 
the gifts which He has given, but for the manner in 
which we use them ; — and that however mean our gifts, 
however small our opportunities, we may know for our 
consolation and encouragement that our reward will be, 
not great, but infinite, if we use them right. To some 
of His servants their Lord gave five talents, to others 
less gifted He gave but two; yet mark, for surely it is 
worth our notice, that though they who had five talents, 
being faithful, had gained five more, and those who had 
but two, though faithful, could but add to them two 
more — though therefore the one had produced in their 
Lord's service less than half produced by the other, yet 
these latter, no less than the other, hear the same 
words of approval, Ev SovXe, dyaSe real iriciTe, " Well 
done, good and faithful servant ; "—these, no less than 
the other, receive the same reward, the reward of new 
and larger opportunities in place of the smaller faithfully 
employed ; these, no less than the other, experience the 
same beatitude, and are bidden to ' enter into the joy of 
their Lord.' Nay, even he to whom but one talent had 
been given would, had he used it rightly, have been no 
less tenderly received. All have had something en- 
trusted to their care; all, in that something, possess means 
whereby they may happily serve their God, and their 
brother here, and enter into his joy hereafter. Is not 
the lesson a lesson of hopefulness and comfort ? Look 

M. S. F 



66 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

up to the sky this evening, and you will see some stars 
preeminent in magnitude, while others, set in the galaxy, 
are lost in one white undistinguishable haze. Yet though, 
as the great apostle says, one star differeth from another 
star in glory, all are of the same pure essence, all of the 
same divine origin : 

" All are the undying offspring of one sire." 

And, therefore, if — as is indeed the case — 

" If thou indeed derive thy light from heaven," 

then, whether it be the most immeasurable radiance or 
the tiniest and feeblest gleam, still 

" To the measure of that heaven-born light, 
Shine, Christian, in thy place and be content." 

i. Let me take two instances, wherein men differ very 
widely in the gifts they have received : and first the 
instance of poverty and riches. " Money," says the book 
of Ecclesiastes, "is a defence," and therefore one who is 
poor in this world's goods has, so far, a talent — that is an 
opportunity, and means of service — the less. Others 
obtain with ease the advantages which he cannot even 
win by effort. Well, my brethren, remember that in 
God's sight poverty, so far from being a disgrace, is a 
beautiful and hallowed lot. You have but little of this 
world's goods ; oh be faithful with that little, and you 
shall find it more than much. There are, I admit, two 
kinds of poverty — the one murmuring and envious, and 
mean, and greedy, and idle ; the other manly and noble 
and helpful, — possessing indeed but little save daily 
bread, but possessing also the lovely virtue of content- 
ment to make it sweet. Now it may be that some of 
you come from poor homes — it may be that many of you 



vu.] LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKED. (VI 

in this crowded nation and competing age may grow up 
yourselves to feel the cares and struggles which poverty 
entails ; and it is perfectly true that the world which is 
not only often coarse and cruel in its conduct, but also 
intensely and essentially vulgar in its estimates, is 
ashamed of poverty, — scorns the necessity of self-denial, 
blushes at the scant table and threadbare garb. My 
brethren, may your education here save you from that 
utter vulgarity of mind and heart. Say with the 
poet : — 

1 * Lives there for honest poverty 

"Who hangs his head and a' that ; 
The coward slave, we pass him by, 
And dare be poor for a' that." 

Yes, since there is such a thing as a poverty which is 
rich in every element of a noble life — since many afoul, 
false heart has beaten under the velvet and the ermine, 
and many a true and royal heart been covered by the poor 
man's serge — nay, since Himself and all His apostles, 
and well nigh all His martyrs and well nigh all His 
saints were poor — then of poverty no man need ever be 
ashamed. If you come from poor homes now, hail it as 
a voice of God speaking to you in kindly accents, and 
bidding you by cheerful activity, by honest labour, to 
lighten the burden of those you love. If you are poor here- 
after, learn that a poverty which scorns luxury — which 
can dispense with superfluities — which can find life purest 
and strongest and sweetest when it is disciplined under 
the beneficent laws of "high thinking and plain living," 
is wealthier in every element of happiness than 

" Twenty seas, though all their shores were pearl, 
Their waters crystal, and their rocks pure gold. " 

Do not imagine even that it will enable you to do less 
for God. The lips of the contemptuous Pharisee might 

f2 



68 IN THE BAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

curl when the poor widow dropped her two mites 
into the gorgeous treasury, but in : the eyes of Him on 
whom they were bestowed, that poor widow had 
given more than they all. Many a struggling 
curate does more for God in the way of charity than 
many a vulgar millionaire. The kind word spoken in 
His service — the cup of cold water given in His name 
— these are possible to the poorest, and kings can give 
no more. " My most dear God," wrote Luther, u I thank 
Thee that Thou hast made me poor and a beggar upon 
earth. Therefore I can leave neither house nor fields, 
nor money to my w^7e and children after me. As Thou 
hast given them unto me I restore them to Thee 
again. Thou rich, faithful God, feed them, teach them, 
preserve them, as Thou hast fed, taught, and preserved 
me, Father of the fatherless and Judge of the 
widow." 

ii. Secondly and lastly, take the instance of stupidity 
— of deficiency in gifts of the intellect. Here again there 
are two kinds of stupidity. There is the wilful stupid- 
ity of blank, unimpressible, contented ignorance — the 
stupidity of the horse or the mule that have no 
understanding — of natures impenetrably sluggish and 
sensually base. There is nothing beautiful in that, for 
it has its root not in the appointment of God, but in 
the obliquity of man. But there is another kind of 
stupidity, if we can apply to it that name at all, which 
is neither ignoble nor offensive, nay, more, which has a 
certain calm and gentleness, a certain worth and beauty 
of its own. Intellectual gifts, if precious, are also 
perilous, and not seldom in this world's history have 
they been shining instruments in the hand of ambition, 

" To render faults 
Illustrious, and give infamy renown." 



vn.] LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKED. 69 

— - — ■ — . . — — — _j 

But when God has created one, who being endowed 
with but small capacities, yet firmly, honesjfy, humbly 
does his best, then to the dignity and sweetness of such 
a character my whole heart opens, and such as these, both 
in boyhood and manhood I have observed to be among 
the noblest I have known. " If there be one thing on 
earth/' said a great teacher, " which is truly admirable, it 
is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural 
powers when they have been honestly and zealously 
cultivated. To so and so/' he used to say, mentioning a 
good but dull boy, " I would stand hat in hand." 

Oh, if I am speaking to any here who are some- 
times vexed by the thought that they can only plod 
on in the paths of humble usefulness, and never 
compete with their more brilliant schoolfellows ; to 
any who sorrowfully think that the world's great 
successes are not for them ; to any who feel that God 
has given to them but the one talent, not the two 
or the five; I would remind them how infinitely the 
great are transcended by the good, I would say to them, 
work on without one shadow of discouragement, without 
one pang of self-depreciation. Do your best, assured 
that God loves you as though the soul of Plato or of 
Shakspeare were your own ; work with as manly a self- 
respect as though Empires would be moulded by your 
counsels, and Senates listen to your words ; work with 
as calm a certainty that he will accept and will bless 
and will reward that work, as though the sunbeam that 
falls upon you were streaming down direct from His 
hand of fatherly blessing, held in invisible consecration 
over your stooping head. Yes, my young brother, be 
thou faithful unto death, and whether rich or poor, 
whether dull or/, intelligent, whether unknown or re- 
nowned, He will give thee, for He has promised, the 



70 IJS 1 THE DAYS OF' THY YOUTH. [serm. 

crown of life. Thou, too, with angels and archangels, 
and all the company of heaven, shalt enter into *the joy 
of thy Lord ; to thee too, no less loudly, with no less 
soul-thrilling emphasis and sweetness, than to the 
lordliest and most glorious souls, shall peal forth from 
the highest empyrean, the blissful utterance of final 
approbation, 

"Servant of God, well done ! " 

I have not said the half of what I meant or wished 
to say, and I have said it poorly and feebly, but I must 
conclude. Yet let me conclude with one allusion. The 
grave, my brethren, has scarcely closed over one who 
not long since was one of your number ; whom many 
of you remember as a school-fellow, whom still more 
of you saw here as a visitor during last half-year. 
I knew enough of him to know how simply and 
honourably in his short life he had used the talents 
which God had given him, and striven to carry out 
some of the lessons which I have striven to indicate 
to-day, and I can testify to his simplicity and modesty, 
to that quiet humility of the Christian, united in 
him with the courteous culture of the gentleman. 
Those who had the pleasure of knowing him better 
could add much more ; and one of his friends and school- 
fellows pronounced upon him this high eulogy, that 
whether as a boy, or a youth, or as a man, no one 
knew harm or evil of Thomas Eagland Dumergne. 
Faithful over a few things, we know well that all such 
shall be rulers over many things. For they fulfil in their 
lives that one rule, which though not in so many words 
recorded in the gospels, is recorded by the earliest 
Church-tradition as having been uttered by the lips of 
Christ Himself, TiveaOe Sofcifiol Tpaire&rai, ' Be good 



vii.] LITTLE GIVEN, LITTLE ASKED. 71 

exchangers ; ' — use, that is, to the very utmost the gifts 
which God has entrusted to you ; use them cheerfully, 
use them vigorously, use them humbly, use them hap- 
pily, use them with the certainty of God's approval, 
whether those gifts be great or small. 

Sept. 24, 1871. 



SEEMON VIII. 

QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE. 

Is. xxx. 15. 
" In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. " 

The connection of this text, my brethren, with the name 
and life of the apostle St. Andrew is not quite mean- 
ingless or artificial. The very little that is known of 
him exhibits forcibly that quietness and confidence to 
which our text exhorts. It was to his calm and strong 
conviction — it was to that untroubled vision enjoyed 
by the pure in heart and hand — that he owed by God's 
blessing the proud pre-eminence of being among the 
very earliest of our Lord's disciples ; and this is the 
reason why his name stands first, stands in immediate 
connection with Advent Sunday, in the bright calendar 
of the Apostles and Saints of God. More than one of 
the few and slight notices recorded of him might furnish 
us with profitable thoughts ; as, for instance, the ready 
faith with which he called the Saviour's attention to the 
little lad with five barley loaves and seven small fishes ; 
or the brotherly love which made him first and at once find 
his own brother Simon and bring him to his Master's 
side. Let us rather, however, dwell on the quiet faith, 
the patient strength, the holy self-possession of soul 



serm. vni.] QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE. 73 

which can alone account for all that is recorded , of him. 
There is a singular contrast between him and his more 
illustrious brother Simon Peter, St. Andrew seems to 
have been all peace and restfulness ; St. Peter all 
fervency and flame. St. Peter's character has been well 
touched in a little book called Life in Earnest, which 
many of you may have read. " Is Jesus encompassed/' 
it says, " by fierce ruffians ? Peter's ardour flashes 
in his ready sword, and converts the Galilean boat- 
men into the soldier instantaneous. Is there a rumour 
of the resurrection? John's nimbler foot distances 
his older friend, but Peter's eagerness outruns the 
serener love of John, and past the gazing disciple he 
hurries breathless into the sepulchre. Is the risen 
Saviour on the strand ?' His comrades turn the vessel's 
head for shore, but Peter plunges over the vessel's side, 
and struggling through the waves falls in his dripping 
coat at his Master's feet. Does Jesus say * bring of the 
fish that ye have caught V Before anyone could antici- 
pate the words, Peter's brawny arm is tugging the 
weltering net with its glittering spoil ashore, and every 
eager movement unwittingly is answering beforehand the 
question of his Lord, c Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou 
me ?' " A noble character, my brethren, a character 
intensely lovable with all its faults : and yet perhaps 
not nobler, and certainly less rare than the unresting 
duty, the unhasting calm, the unclouded conscience, the 
unwavering faith of that gentler and less famous 
brother, who first uttered to his astonished ear, that great 
eureka, EvprjicafjLev rbv Miao-iav, <( We have found the 
Messiah, which is, being interpreted, the Christ." 

1. There are two kinds of character, my brethren, — 
the fervent and the contemplative — the enthusiastic and 
the peaceful — and each of them is admirable and each 



74 IN THE DAYS OF TRY YOUTH. [serm. 

necessary for the progress and well-being of the world. 
But, as the ancients said, Comvptio optimi pessima, and 
each of these is liable to a certain degeneracy which 
is very common, so that instead of fervour we find 
restlessness, and instead of quietude lethargy. Of the 
one — which as it is the least amiable and the least 
hopeful, is also happily the rarer — I will not speak. It 
is the cold, dead, lethargic, unemotional character: 
always contented in its self-satisfaction, always imper- 
turbable in its conceit. Of these I will only quote the 
words of Scripture to the Angel of the Laodiceans : 
" Thou sayest I am rich, and increased with goods, and 
have need of nothing ; and knowest not that thou art 
wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and 
naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in 
the fire, that thou may est be rich; and white raiment, 
that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of 
thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes 
with eye-salve, that thou mayest see. As many as I 
love, I rebuke and chasten : be zealous therefore, and 
repent." 

2. But the other character is fussy, and flurried, and 
restless— totally without repose, totally without dignity, 
always in extremes. There is no perspective about 
it, no silence, no sobriety, no self-control ; it values 
no blessing which it has, because it is always yearn- 
ing for some blessing which it has not ; it enjoys 
no source of happiness in the present, because it is 
always fretting, and if I may use the phrase fidget- 
ing for some source of happiness in the future. 
At School it is restless and dissatisfied because it is 
not at the University ; and at the University because 
it is not yet in the active work of life ; and in the 
active work of life, because the harvest of its poor 



vni.] QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE. 75 

endeavours is not reaped well-nigh as soon as it is 
sown ; and so the inevitable days slip on and the man 
dies or ever he has lived. Often this restless discon- 
tented misery is the Nemesis of a sinful life, for St. 
Jude speaks of those who are like "raging waves of 
the sea foaming out their own shame," and the prophet 
Isaiah tells us, " The wicked is like the troubled sea, 
when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and 
dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." 
But often it is not so bad as this ; it is the mere rest- 
lessness, and excitement, and discontent bred by a soul 
which has no sweet retirements of its own, and no rest 
in God, no anchor sure and steadfast on the rushing 
waves of life. It is bred by a harassed age in which 
we find no leisure ; in which 

" The world is too much with us ; late and soon 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
We have given our souls away, a sordid boon ; " 

or, in which, as another expresses it, we 

" See all sights from pole to pole, 

And glance, and nod, and bustle by ; 
And never once possess our soul 
Before we die." 

3. Now to both these common characters this text 
offers an antidote ; to the self-satisfied, a confidence which 
is not conceit, a quietude which is that of a glassy sea, 
not that of a stagnant and corrupting pool; to the restless 
and anxious, a quietude and a confidence which are 
nothing else than a calm faith and happy trust in God. 
And therefore the text, beautiful in itself, has had for 
many a singular charm. It is, as you know, the motto 
of that quiet and holy book which has soothed so many 



76 IN THE DAYS OF TEY YOUTH. [serm. 

restless souls — The Christian Year. And to us in this 
place it ought to have a deeper and yet more real 
interest, because it was the favourite motto of that good 
and eminent man — to whom to the latest day of" its 
existence Marlborough will owe so much, and who to 
some of us here present was once a beloved and living 
friend, and not merely a hallowed memory. When at 
a time of deep anxiety he came to the place it was the 
one thought which he carried with him. Many would 
have shrunk with dread from the responsibility before 
him, but he did not, because to him responsibility was 
but the quiet, earnest, faithful fulfilment of the duty to 
which God had called him ; many would have been 
painfully anxious about the success of their work, but 
he was not, because he knew that duties are always in 
our own hands, results always and alone in the hand 
of God. In the very first words which he uttered in 
this chapel he said to the Marlborough boys at that 
day, " The very youngest boy in this chapel has hardly 
so much need to pray for God's grace in the work set 
before him as I who have urged you to it." And 
when, though the burden and heat of the day was 
already over, he was called to another new and arduous 
work in that toilsome Indian bishopric, it was again 
these words which consoled and encouraged him. I, my 
brethren, who stand where he stood, who speak from 
the very spot where, on these saint's day evenings, he so 
often spoke — I, who by a slight effort of memory, can 
recall the very expression of his face and very accent of 
his voice, and who have wandered with him so often on 
the terrace, and in the forest, and over the downs — know 
well, how earnestly, were he now here, he would at- 
tribute any particle of success wherewith God blessed 
his labours to the grace which enabled him to keep this 



vin.] QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE. 77 

spirit alive in his heart, like a silver lamp shedding its 
quiet radiance over the darkness — know well that, if 
his happy spirit still linger here in a place which was 
so dear to him, and among the successors of those who 
were once his beloved children in the Lord, there is no 
lesson which he would urge upon you with a more 
fatherly gentleness than this — "Thus saith the Lord 
God, In returning and rest shall ye be saved ; in quietness 
and in confidence shall be your strength. 5 ' 

4. The text opens many a wide vista, and it is im- 
possible at all adequately to illustrate and enforce it. I 
will, therefore, leave it with you for your own meditation, 
only praying that God's Holy Spirit may impress it 
deeply upon all our hearts. But I will merely mention 
the cause why it suggested itself to me to-day as likely 
to be profitable to some of you. It was because to many 
of you — I hope to the large majority of you, certainly 
to all the noblest and best of you, to all, in fact, except 
the idle and the frivolous — the two weeks of school-time 
which yet remain to us, must be weeks of effort and 
anxiety. You know how very much depends for most 
of you in the future upon the exertions of the present ; 
you know that in an age of struggle and competition and 
over-population it will require on your parts a distinct 
and vigorous effort to secure those conditions which are 
the ordinary elements of a reasonably happy life ; you 
know that in this age, even as regards mere earthly 
success and position, the axe is at the root of the barren 
trees ; you know, in fact, that what is called your chance 
in life depends in great measure on what you do and on 
what you learn here now. I suppose that for the two- 
thirds of you the complexion of your future, its earthly 
prosperity, or its comparative earthly failure, turn on 
your ability to pass well or ill, or even to pass at all, in 



78 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

certain competitions which will test how far you have 
used the opportunities which it is the earnest and 
faithful endeavour of us, your teachers, to further to 
the uttermost. And all these are, and ought to be, 
powerful motives, though even these are, and ought to 
be, less powerful than the nobler considerations that all 
who love you will take a keen interest in the success or 
non-success of your school endeavours, and above all, 
far above all, that those endeavours being incumbent on 
you from your very position here, are in reality a part of 
your duty to your neighbour and your God. And all 
these considerations ought to produce in your minds a 
steady, conscious purpose, deliberately to do your best ; 
to waste no time ; to cultivate to the utmost, wisely, 
carefully, and thoughtfully the power both bodily and 
intellectual, as well as spiritual, which God has given 
you. But I cannot feel surprised, nor can I blame, 
a tendency to restlessness and anxiety at a time of 
examination, any more than I can be surprised if you 
even look forward with some care and misgiving to 
the necessary uncertainties of your future life. And, 
therefore, as the best remedy which I can offer, I would 
say in sincere sympathy, " In quietness and in confidence 
shall be your rest" Bo not yield to over anxiety. Fevered 
work, flurried work, anxious work, restless work, is 
always bad work. Work all of you as if you felt and 
realised " the dignity of work, the innocence of work, the 
happiness of work, the holiness of work." Do your best 
loyally and cheerfully, and suffer yourself to feel no 
anxiety or fear. Your times are in God's hands. He 
has assigned you your place. He will direct your paths. 
He will accept your efforts if they be faithful. He will 
bless your aims if they be for your soul's good. Eegard 
your present lite— the present conditions of your life — 



Till.] QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE. 79 

as His assignment and His boon ; regard the present 
hours — yea, the very moments of your life — as no less 
real, as no less substantial, as no less important, as no 
less certain to enjoy God's blessing of innocent happi- 
ness and cheerful hope — perhaps far more so — than 
any of the moments which are yet to come. Do your 
best then in quietness, not in feverish impulse; do 
your best with confidence, — not confidence in your poor, 
ignorant, feeble self, but in a merciful and tender God, 
and be quite sure that whatever else may happen to 
you, or not happen, this at least will happen — which is 
greater than all earthly blessing — that His loving Spirit 
will lead you into the land of righteousness. Neither 
in these examinations which are immediately before 
you, nor in any of the competitions on which the future 
profession of many of you will depend, nor in the 
increasing labour, and struggles of your future lives — nay, 
not even in the hour of death or in the day of judgment 
will he have any cause to be unhappy or to fear who has 
quietly, humbly, faithfully done his best 

. St. Andrew's Day, Nov. 30, 1871. 



SEEMON IX. 
THE GRAIN OF MUSTABD SEED. 

Matt. xiii. 21. 
" The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed." 

The parable of the grain of mustard seed must be taken 
in close connection with that of the leaven, and both 
are meant to illustrate the small beginnings, the silent 
growth, and the final victory of the grace of God in the 
human soul. But they belong to different points of 
view. The one is extensive the other intensive. The 
parable of the grain of mustard seed shows us the 
origin and the development of the kingdom of God, in 
communities and in the world ; the parable of the leaven 
shadows forth its unimpeded influence in the soul of 
each separate man. 

It is not, however, my object to explain either parable, 
but rather to touch on one or two natural thoughts 
which their central conception seems to suggest. May 
God, — who only can, — make even so insignificant a thing 
as a weekly sermon, one more barrier against evil, one 
more impulse to good in every heart among us. What 
so trivial and worthless as an atom of sand ? yet God 
binds even the atoms of sand together into an invincible 



serm. ix.] THE GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED. 81 

barrier against the fury of the sea. What so insignificant 
as a grain of mustard seed? Yet even a grain of 
mustard seed can grow into an overshadowing tree, and 
the fowls of the air — the restless haughtinesses, and 
hopes, and cares, and fears of men— take refuge in its 
branches. 

There are two classes of men in the world, distinctly 
marked indeed, but of which one contains infinitely 
few, the other the vast majority of mankind. To the 
first of these classes belong those who from the earliest 
dawn of their intelligence, from the first possibility of 
independent will, in a word, from the earliest day that 
they can remember, have striven to be, and have been 
the children and servants of God. Innocent-hearted 
to the last, as when they lifted their little hands to 
lisp to their Heavenly Father an infant's prayer, they 
have carried the sweetness and simplicity of childhood 
into the powers of manhood; they have retained "the 
young lamb's heart amid the full-grown flocks." To 
them duty has always been the natural and happy 
law of life ; to them purity of soul and dignity of 
temper have come like spontaneous growths. The 
temple of their hearts has not been desecrated ; the 
fountain of their being has not been troubled; the 
white robes of their baptism have not been stained. 
The crown is still upon their foreheads, for they have 
not sinned. To them, as one of our holiest poets has 
said, 

1 1 Love is an unerring light, 
And joy its own security." 

Such a man, upon a throne, was St. Louis of France ; 
such, in a cloister, was Fra Angelico di Fiesole ; such, 
as a reformer, was St. Benedict of Nursia; such, in 
literature, were John Milton and William Wordsworth. 

M.S. G 



82 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

Nay, what need of meaner examples ? Such in his sweet, 
noble, diligent, submissive boyhood, in the shop of the 
carpenter at Nazareth, was the Son of God Himself. 
Lambs of God are these, by the still waters of His 
comfort, in the green pastures of His love. " It is," 
says one, " the most complete picture of happiness that 
ever was, or can be, drawn. It represents the state of 
mind for which all alike sigh, and the want of which 
makes life a failure to most. It represents that Heaven 
which is everywhere if we could but enter it, yet 
almost nowhere because so few of us can." 

Some I trust are here who may humbly claim this 
happiness, — 

" Glad souls without reproach or blot, 
Who do God's work and know it not ; " 

yet (thanks to our own wilful and wayward hearts) 
never and nowhere are there many. 

" How," asks one in the Book of Job, " how can man 
be justified with God ? or how can he be clean who is 
born of a woman ? Behold even to the moon, and it 
shineth not; yea, the stars are not pure in his sight. 
How much less man that is a worm, and the son of 
man that is a worm ? " 

Peace, alas ! comes not to most men but by struggle : 
and only through bitter experience of evil is learnt the 
ennobling, absorbing lesson, that good is best. 

II. Not perfect innocence then, but humble and 
sincere repentance, forms the main distinction between 
man and man ; and if happy is he who has kept inno- 
cency, and done the thing that is right, happy also is 
he whose iniquity is forgiven and whose sin is covered. 
These have not always been God's children, but they are 
so now : they were afar off, they have now been made 



ix.] THE GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED. 83 

nigh by the blood of Christ. But how ? whence sprang 
that desire, which became first a prayer, then an effort, 
until the sinner, in his pride and blindness, learnt finally 
that it was an evil and a bitter thing that he had 
forsaken the Lord his God, and that the fear of God 
was not in him ? 

My brethren, that change is conversion, beyond all 
comparison the most entire and awful change that can 
happen to any man in life. It is in fact a new life ; it 
brings the soul into new relationships with God. The 
rebel becomes the child, the haughty humble. He who 
hid himself from God in shame and anger now goes 
forth to meet Him in boundless joy. Once mean, he 
now is noble ; once passionate, he is now self-controlled ; 
once frivolous, now soberminded ; once unclean in every 
imagination, now sweet and pure ; once full of an evil 
spirit, he is now clothed, and in his right mind ; once 
a leper, his flesh has now come again like the flesh of 
a little child. 

(1.) Now this great change of conversion appears to 
occur in two ways — sometimes it seems to be the 
work of an instant, sometimes to be diffused imper- 
ceptibly over many years. 

Though the world scoff at them, there are such 
things as instantaneous conversions, supreme crises 
and movements in the history of life, which, like the 
shock of an earthquake, cleave a sudden rift deep down 
between all that a man has been and all he is. Such 
was the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus ; such 
was the sudden arrest which happened to the soul of 
Bunyan; such the revulsion of horror which changed 
De Eance from the dissolute courtier into the devoted 
saint. And oh, what a change ! A man, in his petty 
■conceit, in his small intellectualism, in his insolent 

G 2 



84 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm, 

self-will, even in his sensual ignorance, has lived in 
habitual antagonism to some majestic, eternal law, 
and suddenly, with overwhelming force, there is flashed 
in upon his conscience an insight that this law which 
he, poor worm, has been violating and trying to ignore, 
is eternal, absolute, independent, not made by him, not 
to be altered by him, but inexorably infinite, and to be 
disobeyed only at his everlasting peril. And when 
that sublime ray of light, that lightning flash out of 
God's eternity, has penetrated his soul, there is an im- 
mense untold interval between that moment and the 
one which preceded it. "The man indeed is left 
untouched, but there is added to him the God who 
created him." All vain, idle, furious passions disappear. 
All the mere emptiness of life becomes repulsive. 
Things temporal vankh, things eternal dawn on him. 
An awful sense of reality comes over him, and joy 
accompanies it. It is as when the weary traveller 
struggles over the Alps, and a moment comes when 
the first soft breeze announces his approach to the 
Italian soil. Before him there may still be barren 
wastes and icy tempests, but from that moment, as 
though there were a new heart in him, he fears no 
danger before him, he forgets every peril and misery 
behind. 

(2.) And yet, even in these sudden conversions as they 
are called, it remains no less true that the kingdom of 
God is like a grain of mustard seed : for just as in the 
workings of the mystery of iniquity no crime is, in 
reality, what it sometimes seems to be, the fatal inspi- 
ration of one miserable moment, because each action 
is in reality influenced by all past actions — so no man 
ever really sprang at one bound from a sinner to a 
saint. The seeds of good must have long been secretly 



ix.] THE GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED. 85 

and silently at work. Those who are familiar with 
tropic forests tell us that for months they look sombre 
and monotonous, till suddenly on some one day they 
will rush into crimson blossom, and blaze in masses of 
floral splendour under the noonday sun ; but the glory, 
so seemingly instantaneous, is in reality a lengthened 
work, and the sun, and wind, and rain, and the rich air, 
and glowing sky, nay, even the lost promise and 
deciduous leaves of many a previous season, must 
have lent their influence for years together, before the 
issue of them can stand thus manifest in the eyes of 
wondering men. 

(3.) And more often the conversion of the heart is 
not even in appearance sudden, but in a long silent 
growth in grace and holiness, preceded by the day of 
small things. In the unseen world as in the seen, 
every man is moulded by myriads of influences, each 
small as a grain of mustard seed, each rich with a 
principle of life ; and as in nature, so in the spiritual 
life, but one seed, alas ! of many millions may be brought 
to bear. None can tell which seed shall bring forth. 
In one man all are hopelessly wasted, on the barren soil, 
in the rocky obstinacy, in the choked and thorny life ; 
yet, in another, a look, a word, a flower, a breath of 
spring, a touch of sunset, a sudden memory, the kind 
warning of a companion, the verse of a hymn, a prayer 
once uttered at the mother's knee, may make the 
difference between life and death. A spiritual lustre 
falls over forgotten or familiar words, like that which 
gleamed over the graven gems of Aaron's breast, and 
makes them awful with oracular import, a, Urim and 
a Thummim, a revelation and a light. 

The beginnings then are small, and secondly the 
growth is silent — first the blade, and then the ear, 



86 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

last of all the full corn in the ear. He, in whom it 
is working, may not at first sight seem different from 
others, different from what he was before ; but he is in 
reality an altered man. Within him all is different ; 
thoughts which he once harboured with complacency, 
he now rejects with horror ; hopes which once absorbed 
his energies, now shrink into nothingness ; little ser- 
pentine envies which once embittered his spirit, now 
perish or creep away. All dark things, all shameful 
things fly from the soul that lies open to the sunlight. 
A hush comes over the turbulence and the sadness of 
his spirit, and in that hush he hears distinctly, hears, 
while his heart thrills within him, the still small Voice 
of God. 

III. But thirdly and lastly, though the beginning 
be never so small, the development never so silent, the 
victory is final. It was so with the. little seed of Christ- 
ianity in the world. Paganism fled vanquished before it. 
One abomination after another vanished ; one cruelty 
after another was repulsed; one high quality after 
another was recognised in principle ; one sweet virtue 
after another realised in practice. So was it in the world ; 
so, my brethren, will it be in you. If conversion have 
indeed begun in you (and, oh, be sure that if it have 
not begun, your life is at this moment a sad, a sinful, 
and a wasted life), but if conversion have begun in 
you, you will be also growing in grace, you will be 
growing day by day purer, humbler, more loving, more 
temperate, more contented, more certain day by day 
that your life is in God's hands. The process will begin 
by the gradual but certain victory over your besetting 
sin. If you would examine yourself before God, if you 
wauld> test whether, even but like a grain of mustard 
seed, the kingdom of God is within you, you may 



ix.] THE GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED 87 

do so simply and decisively by telling whether you 
feel a deepening dislike, whether you are engaged in 
an ever deadlier struggle, against the sin which most 
easily besetteth you. If you hate sin less than you 
did when you first were tempted, if familiarity with 
sin have made it seem less sinful, then look to it, for 
evil is before you. He who says I will struggle against 
sin hereafter, instead of saying I will struggle with it 
now ; he who is content to fight with it in fancy " in the 
green avenues of the future/' not in fact in the hot 
plains of to-day — will proceed to make excuses for it, 
will come at last not even to feel its horror. To put 
off repentance is to court ruin ; to postpone the season 
is to perpetuate the sin. Even to hesitate is to yield ; 
even to deliberate is to be lost. Take any instance of 
sin. Take evil thoughts, which are the fons et origo of 
every sin. You are tormented, say, by evil thoughts, by 
evil thoughts of envy, of hatred, of impurity. Do you 
really long that God would cleanse the thoughts of 
your heart by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit ? 
Well, number to yourself the days in which you have 
not yielded to this temptation. " I did not yield to 
evil thoughts yesterday, or the day before, or for the last 
week : " and if indeed a whole month have passed since 
you succumbed to this temptation, then thank God very 
humbly on your knees. " For the habit is first loosened, 
then eradicated." 1 If you can say then on your knees 
before God, honestly, in the light of your own conscience, 
— if you can say, I am struggling, I have, even in part, 
even for a time, succeeded, — then be sure that if you 
continue to be in earnest, it will soon be all right with 
you ; be sure that then God is leading you by the 
hand, leading you by His loving Spirit into the land of 

1 Epictetus. 



88 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. ix 

righteousness. Yes, be sure in that case that you are 
not far from the kingdom of heaven now, nay, more, be 
sure that the kingdom of heaven is with you, and shall 
be in you. " For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a 
grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in 
his field; which is indeed the least of all seeds, but 
when it is grown it is the greatest among herbs, and 
becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come 
and lodge in the branches of it." 

April 14, 1872. 






SEKMON X, 



INNOCENT HAPPINESS. 



Eccl. xi. 9. 



" Eejoice, young man, in thy youth ; and let thy heart cheer thee in 
the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in 
the sight of thine eyes : but know thou, that for all these things 
God will bring thee into judgment. w 

Theke are two ways, my brethren, in which this text 
may be read and understood. It may be read as the 
mocking accent of a pitiless irony ; it may be read as 
the sincere counsel of a noble and loving heart. 

According to the first view, the text would mean — Go, 
poor fool, and snatch such transitory enjoyment as thy 
youth and gaiety allow; the sea of things seen and 
temporal sparkles around thee, launch upon it thy little 
gilded bark, and spread every sail to the prosperous 
winds; but there, in the deep shadow of the future, 
hushed in grim repose, the whirlwind waits thee, and 
the painted shallop which now dances so gaily over the 
sunlit ripple shall soon be " a dismantled hull upon the 
troubled waters or a desolate wreck upon the lonely 
shore." Go then, — rejoice ; that mirth is but the 
fantastic prelude to disappointment and despair. 

No doubt, my brethren, there was a time when, sated 
and cloyed with luxuries, and finding his mouth filled 
with the ashes of such Dead Sea fruit, Solomon might 



90 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

have been tempted to speak like that. Many a weary 
worldling, many a worn voluptuary — sick to the very 
heart at the sight of pleasures which he can no longer 
enjoy — has said the same. For selfishness always makes 
tHe heart callous a$d cruel, and it is the characteristic 
of impenitent evil to find self-solace in watching the 
ruin of others. But though the whole book of Eccle- 
siastesis the deep sigh of one who was conscious of a 
wasted life, it is the sigh of a godly and noble penitence. 
The sadness of the book is a personal sadness, but it is 
free from all taint of envy, and it is with a sincerity 
which every good man will echo, that Solomon says 
" Eejoice, young man, in thy youth." But because 
he well knew the danger of unchequered prosperity 
and joy, therefore he adds, Eejoice, yet accept the 
warning, — not as though some dark hand wrote in 
threatening fire upon the walls of thy banquet-house, — 
but as though an angel voice whispered it gently in 
thy ears. In the midst of thy mirth remember, — lest 
it become guilty, lest it become foolish, lest it become 
excessive — remember in order that it may be sweet, that 
it may be innocent, that it may be permanent, that this, 
like every other portion of thy life, will come before a 
Divine All-seeing Judge. 

You see, my brethren, that two different theories of 
life, and as a natural consequence two different schemes 
of education, may depend upon the lessons drawn from 
words like these. Those who find in them a mockery 
and reprobation of all pleasure have framed their 
methods of training in accordance with such a belief. 
They have repressed harshly, they have condemned 
unhesitatingly, the natural elasticity and mirthfulness 
of early life ; by formal discipline, by ascetic practices, 
by incessant surveillance, by close routine they have 



*.] INNOCENT HAPPINESS. 91 

succeeded in imposing upon boyhood itself the staid 
looks and frigid formality of soberer years. Those who 
are familiar with foreign cities will recall the natural 
results of a system so unnatural ; they will remember 
with pity the boyish faces that had in them no boyhood ; 
the dull depression, the listless bearing, the furtive 
glance of those who from childhood upward have been 
taught to regard all play as folly and all gaiety as sin. 
But this repressive education is the very reverse of that 
which for centuries has been carried on at our public 
schools. The instinct and wisdom of England have led 
her to feel that no warm, glowing, large-hearted man- 
hood can follow on a soured and gloomy youth ; have 
led her to desire for her children an education more 
hearty, more manly, more liberal. There was indeed 
one age in which the belief seemed to waver. The 
Puritanism of one fiery generation achieved in England 
a great and glorious work, but it partly neutralised that 
work when it laid upon the nation that iron cramp from 
which the baser sort broke loose in the foul license and 
bacchanalian frenzy of the succeeding reigns, and by 
which some even of the nobler and the better have 
thenceforth been bound by a needless yoke. Yet surely 
in all nature, even if we look no further, God has shown 
us that He desires our happiness. The God who flings 
the yellow rainbow across His storms, and bids the 
sunset rim his very thunderclouds with golden light, — 
that God who gives its splendour to the flower and its 
pearly lustre to the shell upon the shore, — that God who 
makes the summer air ring with the hum of insects and 
the careless melody of happy birds, — surely He did not 
wrap round this world with sweet air and bathe it in 
happy sunshine that we should regard gloom as the 
normal aspect of our lives. Nay, He has shot many a 



92 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

golden thread through the woof of life, and to darken 
those threads by needless sadness is an offence against 
His love. There is indeed a sorrow born of deep 
afflictions, the scathing of the flame which is meant to 
purge away the dross ; — there is a sorrow which springs 
from that divine and perfect sympathy which can know 
no perfect happiness while it witnesses the misery 
of other children in the one great family of God; 
— there is a sorrow which has its source in that deep 
penitence which the Peace of God has not yet healed, 
and these are forms of sorrow which are noble and not 
sinful : but there is also a sorrow born of sin and 
egotism, and the fretting of bad passions, and the 
weight of chance desires, and that sorrow is wholly 
ignoble, and when it is seen in boyhood, as it is some- 
times seen, it is the saddest of all omens for a wasted 
and miserable life. In the great Poem of the Middle 
Ages to which I have more than once alluded — it is a 
storehouse of moral wisdom — the two poets, as they 
traverse the gloomy circles of the Inferno, come upon a 
stagnant and putrid fen, and there, buried in the black 
mud, they see the souls of the gloomy-sluggish, who in 
expiation of their sinful gloom in life, are ever forced to 
mutter — 

" We were sad 
In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun, 
Now in this miry darkness are we sad." 

You see to be sad in the sunshine was a crime in the 
great poet's eyes, and the poets and prophets of Scrip- 
ture were herein at one with him; for David says, 
" Eejoice in the Lord, oh ye righteous ;" and Isaiah, " Thou 
meetest him who rejoiceth, and worketh righteousness ; " 
and St. Paul, "Eejoice in the Lord always, and again I say 
rejoice.'' 



x.] INNOCENT HAPPINESS. 93 

And you know, my brethren, nor should any know 
better than Marlborough boys, that such are the views 
of those who are placed in authority over you. We 
are anything but out of sympathy with the mirth, the 
games, the victories which not unnaturally occupy a 
large share of your attention. We rejoice at your 
triumphs, we grieve at your failures ; we feel a personal 
and friendly interest in your individual successes. If 
we ever moderate any tendency to excess or extravagance 
in your amusements, it is only because we would not 
have them incompatible with those deeper, more import- 
ant, more permanent, more eternal gains which we 
would still see yours, long after the strong arm has lost 
its vigour and the keen eye its light. Never forget that 
you are God's children, that your fear, your gratitude, 
your worship, your service are due to Him night and day ; 
and then be sure that, so far from having one happy 
hour the fewer, or one smile the less, the long summer 
days will catch a gleam of fresh brightness from the 
spontaneous mirth of an unsullied conscience and a fear- 
less heart; nay, even wet and cheerless days like these will 
catch the diffusive glow of an inward sunshine. Tour 
lot is a very happy one. You have many an hour of 
healthy exercise and pleasurable amusement ; many a 
happy afternoon of relaxation and indulgence ; many a 
valuable opportunity for intellectual progress, and for 
work which makes no too severe demand upon your 
powers. And now your holidays are rapidly approach- 
ing, and many sunlit months are opening before you, 
Some of you will be among the bracken and the heather 
on the hills and moors ; some of you. will be spending 
the golden days with the laughter of the summer waves 
to gladden your eyesight, and their murmur to soothe 
your ears; others, and perhaps not the least enviable 



94 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [sbrm. 

these, will be enjoying the peace of their own innocent 
and quiet homes. Oh, what wealth more golden than 
gold is here ; what a crowd of blessings ; what a welling 
fountain of sweet waters, of which some memory at least 
should gladden even the thirstiest desert of after years 1 
Rejoice then as our Heavenly Father wills that you 
should rejoice. Kejoice, — but evermore remember. Ee- 
member that God's eye is upon you, remember that the 
laws of God, like the laws of the physical world, are 
entirely independent of you, your likes or dislikes, your 
knowledge or ignorance, your belief or unbelief, and yet 
that you are environed by them from the cradle to the 
grave, and it is at your own peril that you disobey them ; 
yes, remember, without fear indeed yet with deep 
solemnity and reverence, that " for all these things God 
shall bring thee into judgment." Such remembrance 
will not make you less happy but more. 

" Why should we think youth's draught of joy, 
If pure would sparkle less ? 
Why should the cup the sooner cloy, 
Which God hath deigned to bless ? " 

Innocent happiness, oh what a world of beatific 
vision is wrapped up in those two words; what a 
heaven on earth they picture and signify! But if 
any of you seek for happiness in sin, which is the 
forgetfulness of God and defiance of His will ; in crime, 
which is some wicked offence against the welfare, 
the peace, the purity of man; in vice, which is some 
degraded tendency in your own personal life, then, my 
brethren, the sin, the crime, the vice leave upon the 
soul and conscience that dark stain of guilt which is 
an abiding and horrifying sense of God's wrath, and 
causes irretrievable shipwreck of all present happiness 
and all future peace. " Guilty happiness ! " there is no 






x.] INNOCENT HAPPINESS. 95 

such thing on earth. Guilty pleasure there is ; a pleasure 
short, envenomed, ruinous in proportion to its guilt — the 
sting of the fondled serpent, the poison in the wine-cup's 
bitter dregs. But guilty happiness ! if any of you in 
the secret thoughts of his heart have ever fancied that 
there is such a thing, oh let him dismiss that false fancy 
now. For guilt and misery indeed walk this world hand 
in hand, but guilt and happiness cannot co-exist. Happy 
while the soul within him is full of leprosy ; happy, 
while his whole life is in disharmony with the will of 
Heaven ; happy, while the fire of remorse will ever and 
anon leap up within him from its unquenched embers, 
and the worm of conscience awake from its undying 
sleep ? — no, my brethren, no man can be happy thus. To 
wander from the safe, the narrow, the holy path of duty 
and virtue, — to seek in forbidden atmospheres a delusive 
and corroding pleasure, — is alas ! to destroy within us not 
only all true happiness, but even the capacity therefor. 
For happiness is like that manna, the angel food of 
Israel in the wilderness, which if gathered duly and in 
moderation, was sweet as honey and pure as the morning 
dew ; but if sought in excess and against God's com- 
mandments ceased to be human food at all, and stank, 
and bred worms, and was corrupt. Oh then learn as the 
most assured and the most invaluable lesson of your 
youth that golden rule of David's, "Keep innocency, and 
do the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man 
peace at the last." That is my lesson, that my message 
to you this morning. The bad boy — and you can draw 
the picture of the bad boy for yourselves — can you con- 
ceive of such a boy as happy ? If it has ever been your 
misfortune to know such a boy, have you not also known 
that he was miserable ? What is his guide in life ? Is 
the traveller safe when he turns his eye from the 



96 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [sbrm. 

northern star to follow the delusive meteor which flickers 
over the fields of death ? Is the ship safe whose course 
is steered not by the steady lustre of the beacon, but by 
the wrecker's deadly fire ? My brethren, the traveller 
may sink in the morass and the ship be torn and 
shattered upon the sunken reef, yet they are safer than 
he who has deliberately forsaken the guide of his youth 
and forgotten the covenant of his God. To lose the 
blessing of an innocent heart is to lose all that is virtuous 
and honourable — all that is lovely and of good report 
— all that sweetens, all that ennobles, all that illuminates 
the life. For innocence and peace and happiness are 
three pearls strung together in the same jewel, and if 
one be ]ost they are lost together and can never again — 
never in this world even for the penitent, even for the 
forgiven — be recovered in their pristine lustre. 

I wanted, my brethren, to speak only of innocent 
happiness to-day, but I have been forced to digress into 
these harder paths, and 

1 ' To support uneasy steps 
Over the burning marie, not like those steps 
On heaven's azure." 

And perhaps it is best that it should so have been, since, 
as of old, it remains the duty of every teacher to call 
not the righteous but sinners to repentance. And is all 
that I have said needless ? I know indeed— and heartily 
do I thank Grod for it — how much there is in your lives 
to praise. I know that many a manly and innocent, and 
high-minded boy is listening to me now ; but is there no 
danger? is every heart here indeed pure, every lip reverent 
and holy ? every conscience sweet and untroubled ? has no 
one need of that warning with which my text concludes ? 
There is a book, my brethren, lying ever open before 
God's throne, and in that book is written every evil 



x.] INNOCENT HAPPINESS. 97 

thought we have ever thought, every idle word we have 
ever spoken, every wicked deed that we have ever done. 
Would you turn the awful pages of that book ? would 
you read its records ? You may, nothing hinders : 
that book though it lie ever open before God's throne, is 
near you, is with you, is within you. It is the book of 
your memory. The memory of man is the book of God. 
And its records, though they appear to be in many 
places obliterated, are in reality indestructible. Oh, 
when in after years you are called upon to turn over 
those folded pages of memory, may you rejoice to know 
that by God's grace they are clear and clean, and that 
there is not on them one of those damned spots which 
wrung even from the lips of David that bitter cry, "Oh, 
remember not the sins of my youth, nor my offences, but 
according to thy mercy think thou upon me, Lord, of 
thy goodness." Tor, in one last word, happy, my brethren, 
is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven, whose sin is 
covered; — but happier, far happier is he to whom the Lord 
imputeth no sin, and in whose spirit there is no guile. 
For though there can be no such thing on earth as a 
perfectly happy life — though what should be the June 
of life will often be chilly as its autumn and rainy as 
its spring — there is a joy which is given only to the 
pure in their purest hour, and there is a heaven and an 
earth " undreamt of by the sensual and the proud ;" and 
he has attained most nearly thereto of whose heart 
the grace of God has taken early hold, and whose 
spirit, amid all the stormy passions of life, has remained 
true to his God and Saviour — 

" True to the kindred points of heaven and home." 

Never out of sympathy with innocence, he is never 
out of sympathy with joy. As his youth has been 
M.S. H 



\ 



98 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. x. 

unstained, his manhood will be noble, his old age a 
crown of glory ; and death will be to him but a shining 
messenger sent to fling wide open before him the 
palace gates of immortality and heaven. 

This is innocent happiness ; and not now only but 
through all your lives, out of a full heart, fervently I 
daily pray that God, — God the Loving, God the Merciful, 
God your God and Father, — may grant it, my brethren, 
to every one of you. 

June 9, 1872. 



SEEMON XI. 

SCHOOL AND HOME. 

1 Sam. ii. 12, 26. 

" Now the sons of Eli were sons of Belial ; they knew not the Lord. 
. . . And the child Samuel grew on, and was in favour both with 
the Lord, and also with men." 

On his road from the ancient Bethel to Samaria the 
traveller will pass a rounded hill separated by narrow 
valleys from the amphitheatre of hills which surround it. 
At no great distance is one of those fountains which 
are so exquisitely dear to the imagination in the 
burning and thirsty East. Silence and desolation reign 
around. Those grey heaps of ruin seem as though 
they were determined to keep their secret. 

On this spot three thousand years ago stood the 
Tabernacle, which was indeed to Israel a Tabernacle of 
witness. Those boards of acacia wood had been hewn 
under the granite crags of Sinai. That gold had been 
molten from ancient ornaments of Egypt. That brazen 
altar was covered with plates beaten from the censers 
of Korah and his company. In that Holy of Holies 
was the Ark of God, overshadowed with the golden 
wings of the Cherubim, wherein was the golden pot 
of manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the two 
tables of the covenant. Every colour on those woven 

H 2 



100 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

hangings, every number in those symmetrical propor- 
tions, had its mystic significance. — It was Shiloh, God's 
bright sanctuary. 

And it was naturally a spot most solemn. Up that 
terraced slope wound the procession of white-robed 
Levites. By that clear fountain, under the glowing 
sunlits that fell through the shadowy leaves ©f the 
vineyards, the maidens of Israel led their sacred dances. 
In those courts, day by day, smoked the fumes of the 
morning and evening sacrifice ; and in the holy place 
the incense breathed its fragrant supplication, and the 
lamp shed its sevenfold lustre ; and into the holiest, in 
his robes of purple and fine linen — his breast " ardent 
with gems oracular," and holiness to the Lord upon his 
brow — entered the high priest, once a year, with the 
blood of atonement. That high priest was the gentle 
and venerable Eli; — and in such a home — which 
seemed to breathe the very atmosphere of holiness 
and prayer — he trained his sons to take gart in that 
hallowed service. 

In the picture of a youth so circumstanced there is 
an almost idyllic charm. It has furnished to Greek 
tragedy one of its sweetest conceptions — the young and 
innocent Ion ministering in the great temple of Apollo 
at Delphi. And here, too, the sacred historian dwells 
with evident pleasure on the beautiful, noble, holy 
boyhood of the child who served before the Lord, wearing 
a linen ephod, and who, in the visitations of the night, 
thrilling to the Divine voice which called him by his 
name, answered fearlessly, " Speak, Lord, for Thy 
servant heareth." Yet from that same tabernacle, from 
that same tutelage, from those same influences, came 
forth also the sons of Eli ; and the sons of Eli were 
sons of Belial ; they knew not the Lord. 



xi.] SCHOOL AND HOME. 101 

The training the same, the product how different ; 
the school the same, the boys whom it educated how 
fearfully contrasted ! Such contrasts seem strange, but 
they are in reality matters of daily experience. Four 
millenniums ago two boys so unlike as Esau and Jacob 
played together from infancy in the same pastoral 
tent. Daily from the same home we see boys go forth, 
some to live noble self-denying lives, others to live 
lives that come to nothing, and do deeds as well 
undone. So too, often, from happy conditions come 
base characters ; from degraded environments strong, 
sweet natures struggle into the light. 

Are there not analogies to this in nature ? " It is a 
marvel/' says an American writer, " whence the white 
pond lily derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting 
as it does from the black mud over which the river 
sleeps, and from which the yellow lily also draws its 
unclean life and noisome odour." So it is with many 
in this world ; the same soil and circumstances may 
produce the good and beautiful and the wicked and 
ugly. Some have the faculty of assimilating to them- 
selves only what is evil, and they become noisome as 
the poisonous water-plant ; some assimilate none but 
good influences, and their characters become fragrant 
and spotless. What then is our inference from this ? 
It is, that only the personal devotion of the heart, the 
personal surrender of the individual will, can save a 
man or make him holy. The sons of Eli, we read in 
the next chapter, made themselves vile. A man's life 
may be influenced, but it is not determined, by his 
circumstances. No aid, save that which comes from 
above to every man, can help him to climb the mountain 
path of life, or enter the wicket-gate of righteousness ; 
nor,,on the other hand, can any will or power except 



102 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

his own retard his ascent or forbid his ingress. On 
ourselves — on the conscious exercise of our own free 
will — depends our eternal salvation or ruin. On the 
one hand, neither man nor devil can control that will if 
we dedicate it to God ; on the other — 

" From David's lips this word did roll, 
Tis true and living yet — 
No man can save his brother's soul, 
Or pay his brother's debt. " 

And is not this thought thus forced upon us by the 
first lesson of to-day, an important and profitable one at 
a time when, for a long interval of rest, you are about 
to exchange the influences of school for the influences of 
home ? May they not help you to understand better 
the meaning and purpose of your present life, and the 
reason why parents — even the most loving, the most 
tender, the most scrupulous — yet send you away from 
the shelter and innocence of home to the dangers and 
temptations of a public school ? 

Let us pause for a few moments on this question of 
school and home. 

Those of you who know anything of our own literature 
will remember how, in the bad days of the last century, 
the poet Cowper was sent from a home of the most 
exquisite delicacy and refinement to a school in which 
reigned, unrepressed, those traditions of cruelty, tradi- 
tions of idleness, traditions of disobedience, traditions of 
every form of vice, which, thank God, have as traditions 
been well-nigh swept away by the reviving earnestness 
and decency of a better age. And you will remember 
the consequences. Depressed, unhinged, spirit-broken, 
by all he had been forced to undergo as a young and 
sensitive boy, a cloud of melancholy, verging at times 
on actual insanity, settled upon his mind, and all the 



xi.] SCHOOL AND HOME. 103 

happiness of his life suffered an awful shipwreck. He 
has described that home, in all its tender sweetness, in 
the immortal Lines on the receipt of his mother's picture ; 
he has described that school in all its repulsive vileness 
in the Tirocinium, He must have indeed a dull and 
cold heart who can read to himself that sweet picture of 
a mother's love to her little boy without tears in his 
eyes, or can wonder that long years after, in his old age, 
the poet could write — 

" that those lips had language ! Life has passed 
"With me but roughly since I saw thee last ; i 
Those lips are thine : thy own sweet smile I see, 
The same that oft in childhood solaced me ; 
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say, 
Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away." 

And when we turn from them to the Tirocinium, 
and know that the stern, sad picture was yet a true one, 
can we wonder that he describes a good father laying 
his hand on his son's head and saying — 

* ' My boy, the unwelcome hour is come, 
And thou, transplanted from thy genial home, 
Must find a colder soil, a bleaker air, 
And trust for safety to a stranger's care." 

And then the poet, expostulating with the father for 
trusting his child to such risks, continues — 

" Thou could' st not, deaf to Nature's tenderest plea, 
Turn him adrift upon a rolling sea ; 
Then — only governed by the self-same rule 
Of natural pity — send him not to school. " 

Now in those days there would have been very much 
to urge for such a conclusion; and yet, even then, 
unconvinced by such arguments, many a sober, God- 
fearing man must have sent his sons to school, not 
ignorant, indeed, of the risks they ran, not even com- 
pelled by intellectual considerations or the necessities 
of modern life, but because, in spite of all, he thought 



104 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

that such a course might be morally the best. With 
many and many an earnest prayer, perhaps with many 
and many a sad misgiving, he would let his son pass 
from the quiet vicarage or country house to the Eton, or 
Harrow, or Winchester of the eighteenth century, know- 
ing that there he might forget to pray, knowing that he 
might learn there to blaspheme and break God's laws ; 
but knowing also that God's grace, if the boy sought it, 
would be sufficient for him ; knowing that no power on 
earth could make him go astray if he opposed to it a 
resisting will ; knowing that the innocence of mere 
ignorance, and the negative goodness which does but 
result from an artificial absence of temptation, is a poor 
thing ; knowing that however sheltered from every wind 
of trial, no human soul can grow up without recognising 
in itself the awful power to resist God's laws ; knowing 
that such an impulse to disobedience must come to 
every soul with its complete humanity ; knowing, in a 
word, that God's will respecting us is this : not that we 
should remain wholly ignorant of the very existence of 
wrong, but that we should know and conquer, that we 
should see and pass it by. 

And many a sad experience of many a broken-hearted 
parent who followed a different course would have 
shown that he was right. For the other method almost 
always fails. Often a boy, the child of religious parents, 
kept and sheltered by them as the apple of an eye, 
brought up it may be by their timid love in some 
country parsonage or the calm shadow of some old. 
cathedral close, going forth, as, sooner or later, he must 
go forth, unarmed to meet the shock of the world's 
temptations, has fallen with a more tragic suddenness 
into a completer ruin. A great writer of fiction has 
drawn such a picture. A youth carefully trained in a 



xi.] SCHOOL AND HOME. 105 

religious home goes to the University, falls into bad 
company, and gets into habits of intemperance. " Need 
I," he says, u depict the fine gradations by which he 
sank ; gradations, though fine, yet so numerous, that, in 
a space of time almost too brief to credit, the clear- 
browed boy looked a sullen, troubled, dissatisfied youth?" 
And why ? because his religion had been but external, 
mechanical, artificial. It was a thin veneer ; there was 
in it no heart of oak. His life had never looked up to 
its source. All that was good in him was good of itself, 
and not of him. So it was easy to go down — over the 
edge of the pit. All return to the unific rectitude of a 
manly life must be in the face of a scorching past and a 
dark future, and those he could not face. 

My brethren, thank God schools are not now what 
they were when Cowper wrote his Tirocinium. I 
know now — may I not say it in this Holy of Holies of 
our spiritual temple ; may I not say it on this Sunday 
morning, when the sound of prayers and litanies still 
rings sweetly in our ears; may I not say it in this 
chapel, where, morning by morning and evening by 
evening, you kneel with bowed heads and reverent 
hearts in the presence of our God and Father ; may I 
not say it at the close of a Half, in which, by God's 
blessing, there has been so much for which to be thank- 
ful, so little to cause pain ; may I not say to Marlborough 
boys ?— that your school is to you a kind and gentle 
nurse, and that it is possible for you here — as it has 
been to hundreds of right-hearted Christian boys before 
you — to live innocent and honourable lives, amid a 
thousand influences for good, none hindering, and many 
helping you ? I know r that I may say it ; not (God 
forbid !) in a spirit of boastfulness, but in a spirit of 
deep humility and gratitude ; and yet it remains true 



106 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



even for you, that the life of five hundred boys congre- 
gated together — not all, it may be, from good previous 
influences ; not all, it may be, of good and pure 
dispositions — cannot be so safe a place, so free from all 
peril and outward temptation to do wrong, as home. 
Why then do your parents send you here ? Why do 
they not keep you at home ? Might not a wise father, 
in the fewest possible words, tell you in answer that 
herein he is but following God's appointed method in 
the probation of a human soul, and that that method is, 
not to shield it from the possibility of evil, but to 
encourage and strengthen it in the deliberate choice of 
good ; not to shelter it from all temptation, but with 
each temptation to provide also the way of escape; 
not to stop the ears of His children against those voices 
which call them aside to the right hand or to the left ; — 
but to purge those ears, so that they may listen to the 
high, authoritative, and tender voice, that still small 
voice which you hear every one of you, each in the 
deep of his own heart, which ever reminds you of the 
one straight path, and ever* utters, " This is the way : 
walk ye in it" 

Now, you will be most sensible of such temptations 
as school life may bring — most inclined to put them 
forward as a complaint or an excuse — if you have 
indeed succumbed to them; if on returning home 
you find that either home is changed or you are 
changed — 

" xVnd, least familiar where he should be most, 
Feels all his happy privileges lost. " 

Some change, of course, there must be, but it need 
not be wholly painful. " On a rock where we landed 
to fish," says a young emigrant in his journal, " I espied 



xi.] SCHOOL AND HOME. 107 

a harebell, the first I had seen for many years, and with 
its meekly-hanging head it told me long and melancholy 
tales of times gone by, never to return ; not that old 
scenes may not be revisited, and the sunshine be bright 
as ever, and the flowers blossom as then ; but it is he 
who revisits them is past and gone — himself and not 
himself ; the heart that saw them is dead, or worse, is 
changed : for that change kills not the memory, the 
long lingering gaze after the fading past." What then 
is this change ? It is nothing less than the growth of 
individuality ; the full sense of the living free will ; the 
loneliness, the separation, the distinctness of each soul, 
as, " travelling daily farther from the east," it realises 
that, like a sphere upon a plane, a human soul can only 
touch other souls at one single point ; that each human 
soul is an island, and that it is surrounded by an 
unvoyageable sea. 

Now, the infinite importance of this growing indi- 
viduality is that it is ourselves, our inmost being ; we 
carry it with us wherever we go, not as our shadow but 
as our substance. It is wholly independent of our 
circumstances ; it is wholly independent of our locality. 
In a temple it may brand us with the guilt of felons ; 
in a dungeon it may ennoble us with the holiness of 
saints. Depraved and corrupted, it would make a hell 
of heaven; cleansed and enlightened, it can make a 
heaven of hell. And if it be indeed an island, if it be 
indeed surrounded by an unvoyageable sea, must we 
not be necessarily miserable if, through our own fault, 
the soil of that island bring forth, not the rich whole- 
some grain whereby man can live, but only the poisonous 
flowers of evil passion, or only things rank and gross in 
nature — weeds, and thistles, and nettles ; the miserable, 
starved, ignoble growth of vices with which we will not 



108 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

struggle, and follies to which, without an effort, we 
succumb ? 

Is it not, then, the obvious conclusion of all that I 
have said that this formation of our character, this 
making of ourselves, is to us of importance simply 
infinite ; that it is, in fact, the very work of life ? Oh 
take that one thought with you. If you are conscious 
of a deteriorating life and a wavering allegiance to God, 
then do not throw the blame upon your circumstances ; 
plead no excuses before the Eternal bar ; suffer not thy 
mouth to cause thy flesh to err, neither say thou before 
the angel, " It was an error." Think not to lay to your 
diseased conscience the flattering unction that your sin 
was the result of circumstance. The first excuse which 
will be crushed at the throne of judgment will be that 
which would lay on others the burden of your own 
blame. Eather recognise on your knees, and with the 
streaming tears of penitence, the many helps to holiness 
around you ; rather confess humbly that if, in spite of 
all His love and care for you, you wilfully choose the 
hard paths of sin, you do so against light and know- 
ledge, and the clear will and help of God. When the 
waves are calm, when the winds are still, when the 
charts are certain, when the moon is bright, when the 
silver mirrors of the lighthouse-beacon, shedding for 
miles their victorious radiance, warn you off the sunken 
reef, can it be aught on the pilot's part save wilful 
negligence or guilty purpose if the gallant ship be cast 
away ? So calm, so still, so certain, so bright, so full of 
noble and kindly circumstance is your life, whether at 
home or school. And if, in spite of this, it is an unholy 
and godless life, whence comes your danger ? Is it not 
from your own will ? Is it not from your own heart ? 
Is it not from your own selves ? 






xi.] SCHOOL AND HOME. 109 

Let us, then, all ask God our Father to take our 
hearts and make them wholly His ; above all, may we 
pray that prayer who hope once more to kneel next 
Sunday, some of us it may be for the last time, at His 
holy table, in fresh communion with each other and 
fresh dedication of our hearts to God. 

Oh, you who were confirmed four weeks ago, have 
you indeed borne all this steadily in mind ? God grant 
that you have ; but if any impression for good has been 
growing faint, now and here and during the coming 
week you may revive it. God grant that you may. 

" Lord, shall we come, come yet again ? 

Thy cnildren ask one blessing more : 
To come, not now alone, but then, 

When life and death and time are o'er. 
Then, then to come, oh Lord ! and be 
Confirmed in heaven, confirmed by Thee." 

June 16, 1872. 



SEEMON XII. 

SELF-CONQUEST. 

Eph. v. 15. 
" See then that ye walk circumspectly." 

I do not purpose to speak to you to-day about those 
two least-known apostles to whom the day is conse- 
crated. The Saints' days of the Church are meant far 
less to glorify the saints by whose names they are 
called, than to teach us the whole principle of the 
saintly life — the motives which animated, the methods 
which trained — above all the example of their Master 
Christ which inspired those " humble and holy men of 
heart." 

"Were I asked to give the briefest possible description 
of the saints I should say that they were " the heroes 
of unselfishness." Selfishness — the love of ourselves, 
the eager passion for our own interests, the grumbling 
assertion of our own rights, the sinful yielding to our 
own desires — is the source of nearly all the ruin and 
misery which devastate the world. Pride springs from 
it ; ambition lives for it ; anger leans on it ; lust serves 
it. It is the fruitful source of all disobedience, and of 
all disbelief; it is a sacrifice of eternal happiness for 
temporary gratification, — of the divinest interests of the 



serm. xii.] SELF-CON Q UEST. 1 1 1 

spirit to the basest instincts of the flesh. The law of 
God says, " Here we have no abiding city ; " selfishness 
says, " Make the world thy feeding-trough." The word 
of God says, "'Be ye holy for I am holy;" selfishness 
says that " Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in 
secret pleasant." The law of God says, u Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy 
neighbour as thyself;" selfishness says, "Forget God; 
please thyself ; despise others ; take thine ease ; eat, 
and drink, and be merry;" — aye! and even while the 
words are being uttered the unseen hand is writing its 
awful messages on the wall of life, and the awful voice 
pealing forth those dread tones which only the awakened 
conscience can interpret, " Thou fool, thy soul shall be 
required of thee." 

But the saints are the heroes of unselfishness ; let 
me on this Saints' day evening call your attention to 
one of that noble army; I shall not have spoken in 
vain, if, by God's blessing, I teach but one soul here 
the lesson which his life mainly illustrates — that with- 
out distinct effort there can be no self-conquest. And 
the lesson is needed. In moral things, certainly, 
perhaps in all our life, perhaps most of all in boyhood, 
our great danger is to walk, not as wise but as fools ; to 
live in the most immediate present with no thought 
whatever of the future ; to live as if even manhood, 
much more as if death, judgment, or eternity were 
an empty dream. St. Paul says, "See that ye 
walk circumspectly," or rather fiXeireTe a/e/K/3<£? ttw 
irepLircLTelre, look accurately how ye walk. There is 
corruption within us ; there is corruption without us. 
We are swayed by bad impulses; seduced by bad 
examples; deceived by bad reasoning; over our life 
hangs a thick veil of darkness which Christ only can 



112 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

remove. The path of life is narrow and uphiilward, 
and unless Heaven's light fall on it one false step may 
be ruin irretrievable. Wary walking therefore, — -as wise, 
not as unwise, — is essential to our safety. 

Now if St. Paul's view of life be true, and it is 
alone true, then it must be hard to live,— T do not mean 
to live a living death, but to live a life which is life 
indeed. Alas ! we do not find it so. We live care- 
lessly and at ease ; we live full-fed, and indolent, though 
we are called to the soldier's watchfulness and the 
pilgrim's toil ; we lrve at random, without plan, without 
discipline, though bidden to nothing less than the 
imitation of God. At the best — surrounded with 
dangers as we are — and often do I wish that I could 
really reveal, above all to you younger boys and you little 
boys, how beset with spiritual danger your days may 
be — we trust to an uncultivated notion of duty for a 
chance solution of difficulties. You train long for a 
five minutes' race ; you do not think it worth while to 
train for the race of life. You practise, and practise 
hard, and endure much to be successful in a game: 
many of you think it of no importance to practise, or 
to give up anything which shall enable you to play 
better the game even of earthly life — much less the 
awful game on success in which depends the future of 
your souls. You will be buffeted, and knocked down, 
and incur danger of heavy blows and broken limbs — 
(and quite right too in hardy and manly English boys), 
to win the praise of your house ; — why will you think 
all effort needless to win the praise of God — and to be 
profitable members of the Church and Commonwealth 
here, and partakers hereafter of the immortal glory of 
the resurrection? Do not think that I disparage the 
physical vigour at which I daily look with interest ; 



xil] SELF-CONQUEST. 113 

but it is impossible to repress a sigh when one thinks 
that the same vigour infused also into intellectual studies, 
which are far higher and nobler, would carry all success 
and prosperity in life irresistibly before you, — and the 
same vigour applied also to spiritual things would make 
you immortal Heroes and Saints of God. 

I will tell you a few things about such a hero and 
saint to-night. You cannot imitate his external life, — 
any attempt to reproduce that is impossible, and would 
be ridiculous ; but the outward acts speak of an inward 
spirit, and every one of us may learn — if we care to 
learn — from the laws that regulated, from the discipline 
that ennobled, from the hopes that inspired that life. 

The third century after Christ was an epoch of 
intense misery and enormous crime. The Eoman 
Empire had, by its own vices, decayed into rottenness 
and weakness. The mass of society was degraded, and 
knew its degradation, and encouraged itself in its 
degradation ; it had' reached that worst stage of 
depravity which willingly fosters depravity in others. 
Even the salt of religion had in many places lost its 
savour. We, after eighteen centuries of Christianity, we, 
for whom it is possible to live the saintly life in the 
commonest routine of society, can have no conception 
how enormous was the difficulty for any good man to 
live holily in that decaying and decadent society. 
Well, exceptional crises need an exceptional example ; 
and times utterly corrupt demand from the Christian 
soldier a vaster range of effort, an intenser heroism of 
endeavour. And God, when He needs such servants, 
sets them apart with the hands of invisible consecration 
for this high service of suffering. He called a young 
boy to the work which should awake a dead and greedy 
age. His name was Antony. He was born in Egypt, of 

M.S. I 



114 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

noble parentage. His boyhood was remarkable for its 
gentleness and simplicity. In early youth he was left 
an orphan in charge of an estate, and of a youthful 
sister. He did his duty faithfully to both, and one day, 
meditating on the simplicity of the early Christians, he 
entered a church, and heard in the Gospel the words, 
" If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast, and 
give to the poor, and come, follow me, and thou shalt 
have treasure in heaven." Heroic souls take only 
heroical explanations ; and he had the courage to believe 
those words, and throw himself as it were on the faith 
of Him who uttered them. Without hesitation he sold 
his fair possessions; he entrusted his young sister to 
the care of some holy women ; he began to train him- 
self deliberately for a life, if possible, of sinless and 
devoted self-denial. "What were his methods ? First he 
worked, for he knew the text, " If any man will not 
work, neither shall he eat ; " then he prayed, for he 
knew the command " Pray without ceasing ; " then he 
sought out good men, for he knew that " Evil communi- 
cations corrupt good manners." And instead of going 
about, as we too often do, judging harshly and hardly 
and arrogantly of our neighbours, he tried to learn 
from all. He contemplated the courtesy of one, the 
prayerfulness of another ; another's freedom from anger ; 
another's ever ready sympathy. He saw how one 
watched, how another studied ; he admired one for his 
endurance ; another for his meekness ; all for their love 
to Christ and to each other. His fixed object in li& 
was to pain no one needlessly ; to make all happy so 
far as in him lay ; above all, and more than all, to be 
a follower of God. This was his object, his purpose, 
the settled determination of his life, and, like all who 
make it their settled object, he succeeded. 



xii.] SELF-CONQUEST. 115 

Don't think that the youthful Antony had no 
struggles, no difficulties : he had deadly struggles, super- 
human difficulties, long, bitter, terrible. He experienced 
in his own person that there are some evil spirits which 
go not out but by prayer and fasting. Now one of the 
conditions of Antony's mind was that the spiritual 
world was to him not only real, but the sole reality. 
What others suppose, he knew ; what others imagine, 
he saw ; what others saw, he felt. Whatever other men 
might think, he knew that he was face to face with the 
Eternal; words of Scripture were to him voices of 
God; temptations to sin were to him assaults of devils; 
and therefore never for one moment did he underrate, 
as we underrate, the grandeur of the conflict in which 
he was engaged. And so on one occasion it seemed' to 
him that he was assaulted by every temptation at once, 
love of money, love of fame, love of ease, love of 
sensual indulgence. With every effort of his reason, with 
every power of his soul, with watchings, with fastings, 
with prayers, with thoughts of Christ, he struggled and 
agonised, and prevailed as against an army of foul and 
terrible demons. And when he had prevailed, — yet not 
he, but the grace of God which he had sought, and 
which was given to him, — he seemed to see before him 
an Evil Being who said, " I have deceived many ; I 
have cast down many ; but now, as in the case of many, 
so in thine I have been worsted in battle." "Who art 
thou ? " asked Antony. " I am," he answered in a voice 
of anguish, "I am the spirit of impurity." Then 
Antony gave thanks to God, and gaining courage said, 
" Thou art weak, and black of soul, and utterly despic- 
able ; nor will I henceforth cast one thought, save a 
thought of loathing, upon thee." 

But Antony having won the victory, still found that 

i 2 



116 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

it was only by continued effort that he could maintain 
it^ — and to maintain it — to teach men the awful, infinite 
value of the human soul — he retired wholly into the 
desert, there to be alone and face to face with himself 
and God. And there by twenty years of prayer, and 
tears, and abstinence, and humbleness, he learnt in his 
patience to subdue his body, and to possess — or rather, as 
it should be rendered, to acquire his soul. His example 
was fruitful, as all sacrifice is always : and to ail he 
taught the same lessons — " To trust in God, and to love 
Him ; to keep themselves wholly, sternly, determinedly, 
from foul thoughts and sensual pleasures ; to rule their 
tongues and their appetites ; not to be deceived by 
fulness of bread ; to watch, to pray ; never to let the 
sun go down upon their wrath." So, in the desert, he 
lived and died. His book was the nature of created 
things. He saw the great sun rise and set over the 
granite hills. He saw the great storm sweep the desert, 
and the great stars look down upon its sands. Working, 
praying, teaching, meditating, he lived holy and died 
happy ; and let the poor shallow criticism which would 
sneer at such as he, remember that Athanasius, the 
glory of the Eastern Church, counted it the highest 
blessing of his life to have seen him ; and that it was 
by hearing his story that Augustine, the glory of the 
Western Church, was first won to deliver himself from 
the trammels of a vulgar, dissolute, selfish life, to 
become himself a high servant and saint of God. 

i. Would to God that you from his life would learn 
two short but eternal lessons ! The one is this — that 
virtue is not above human nature. God has bidden us 
be humble, peaceful, charitable, pure ; God has not 
bidden us to do what we cannot do. Most of us seem to 
act as though the law of God could not be obeyed, or 



xii.] SELF-CONQUEST. 117 

not by us ; the soul not saved, or not by us. But we 
can obey God's holy law ; we can work out our own 
salvation with fear and trembling. Whatever his cir- 
cumstances, whatever his temptations, whatever his 
character — aye, even whatever his habits — there is not 
one boy in this chapel who might not be free, and 
noble, and calm, and pure. Antony was not older 
than the eldest of you when he obeyed the voice which 
bade him part with all for God. Benedict was younger 
than nearly all of you when, in his mountain cave 
among the Sabine hills, he trained himself by stern 
self-denial to regenerate his age. Francis of Assisi 
was still a youth when the spectacle of the Passion 
burnt upon his soul the lesson, " If thou wilt come 
after Me, deny thyself, and take up thy cross, and 
follow Me/' 

ii. That is one lesson, — that godliness is possible ; the 
other is that it is not possible without effort. Be sure 
of this — nothing worth anything can ever be gained 
without paying the price which nature, and man, and 
God have ordained. If you want physical success, you 
must work for it. If you want intellectual success, 
you must work for it. If you would conquer your bad 
habits, if you would resist your besetting sins, if you 
would save your souls from sin, and hell, and the death 
that cannot die, you must work for it. For not, as 
Dante says — 

" Not on flowery beds, or under shade 
Of canopy reposing, heaven is won. " 

No man, says another poet — 

" No man e'er gained a happy life by chance, 
Or yawned it into being with a wish." 

It stands written in the Koran that, " Under the 



118 



IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xit. 






shadow of the crossing scimitars Paradise is pre 
figured : " the prophet meant it of the sword by which 
he propagated his faith ; but we may understand it of 
the spiritual armour. Yes, under the shadow of the 
crossing scimitars — yes, in the battlefield against sin 
and death, — yes, where the fiery darts of the wicked 
one fly fast and thick — there, in the deadly struggle of 
internecine opposition against all that we know to be 
wicked and opposed to God, — there for us lies the only 
safety. " See, then, accurately how ye walk." If you 
would win the saint's glory, you must fight the 



saint's fight :- 



' ' They climbed the steep ascent of heaven, 

'Mid peril, toil, and pain : 
Oh God, to us may grace be given 

To follow in their train ! " x 



1 For one or two thoughts in this Sermon I am indebted to an 
unpublished Sermon by Canon "Westcott. 



St. Simon and St. Jude, Oct. 28, 1872. 



SEEMON XIII. 
THE PERIL OF WASTE. 

John vi. 12. 
"Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." 

You have heard these words, my brethren, in the Gospel 
of to-day. Even in their most literal and obvious sense 
they are fall of instruction. But as the miracles of 
Christ were more than mere acts of power, so the words 
of Christ reached farther than their direct significance. 
And I shall understand these words as warning us 
against other waste than the waste of food, — as bidding 
us to gather other fragments than the fragments of a 
feast. The half-year is nearly over. It has given us 
invaluable time — that time is drawing to a close ; it has 
been rich in priceless opportunities — those opportunities 
are being rapidly withdrawn. As regards that time, 
as regards those opportunities these words warn us 
against the sin of waste. To myself, and to all of you, 
I apply this morning the words of Christ, " Gather up 
the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." 

1. Looking back on this half-year, may we not say 
that so far it has been by God's blessing a quiet and a 
happy one? An ancient heathen would never have 
ventured to speak thus. Before even hinting at any 



120 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [seem. 

happiness of his own, he would have thought it neces- 
sary to do homage to Nemesis. He would have dreaded 
lest the mere mention of prosperity should provoke the 
anger and jealousy of Heaven. The feelings of a Christian 
are very different. When God has been very good to 
him, or to the body of which he is a member, — when 
God has shed the dew of His blessing either on the 
heart or life, — he looks up to that God, not as to an 
arbitrary or jealous despot, but as to a tender father, who 
is pleased with his happiness, who wills his salvation. 
And so, if, as he walks by the dusty wayside of life, 
he has drunk of the brook by the way, and plucked some 
of the sweet and simple flowers which broider it, — very 
humbly and very thankfully, desiring that God's gifts 
may make him neither presumptuous nor negligent, — 
he offers unto God thanksgiving, and pays his vows unto 
the Most Highest. Well then, thanking God, and taking 
courage, we may say, I trust, that God has not with- 
holden His blessing from us. No harm has happened 
to us, nor any plague come nigh our dwelling. We have 
not been troubled by sickness, nor had to mourn for the 
stroke of death ; nor have we suffered the anguish of 
worse sorrows than those, — worse, because they affect 
not the perishing body, but the immortal soul, — 
the bitter dread, I mean, lest there should be sin 
flourishing in the midst of us ; — lest boys coming among 
us should be subjected to ruinous perils and cruel 
temptations ; — lest there should be neglected roots of 
bitterness to spring up and trouble us ; — lest bad boys 
should have more influence here than good ; — lest to 
watch, and to pray, and to seek the love, and to obey 
the law of God, should be the exception here, and not the 
rule ; — we have had, I say, no cause to indulge such 
fears ; rather have we had everv reason to hope the 



xiii.] THE PERIL OF WASTE. 121 

contrary, — to be persuaded better things of you, brethren, 
and things which accompany salvation. And for this 
cause we bow our heads, and offer up with thankful 
hearts our gratitude to God : — 

"Our vows, our prayers, we now present 
Before Thy throne of grace ; 
God of our fathers, be the God 
Of their succeeding race ! " 

2. But how is it when we turn from the school to 
ourselves, from the society to its separate members, — 
from the life of the body to the lives of each individual 
boy ? That must be answered by each for himself. 
But, though each heart knoweth its own bitterness, I hope 
— nay, more, I believe — that there are many and many 
of you who can look back on the past part of this half 
year without a blush and without a sigh ; boys who have 
been diligent ; who have been faithful ; who have kept 
a watch over the door of their lips ; who have resisted 
temptation in their own hearts ; who have, humbly yet 
zealously, done all they could for the good of others ; 
who, by faith, by prayer, by a sense of the eternal, by 
seeking and gaining the grace of God, have had. a right 
spirit within them ; who, being meek, have inherited 
the earth ; who, being pure in heart, have seen God. 
These need but a word of gentle and hearty encourage- 
ment not to be weary in well doing. Hitherto you have 
tried to use your time well and wisely : continue to do 
so, and may God bless you in it ! The closing weeks of 
a half year are often a time of temptation. There is a 
fear of relaxing vigilance ; there is a peril in natural 
excitement ; the moment of putting off the armour may 
be the moment of a wound. It is a time when all 
who love and fear God, and desire the welfare of their 
own souls, and the souls of others, should more than 



122 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

ever watch and pray against all temptation. It is a 
time to take Christ's warning to ourselves, " Gather up 
the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." 

3. But are there not some with whom it is far other 
wise? Have not the consciences of some, as they 
listened, burning with unrepented sins, told them that 
the picture which I have drawn is not for them ? Let 
me suppose such a one, and let each who is such take 
my words as addressed in all kindness and faithfulness 
to him and him alone. You began the term with high 
hopes and good resolves. You were conscious of serious 
failings, — but you would resist them. You were apt to 
yield to special temptations, but you would light against 
them. You had one known besetting sin, but, God 
helping you, now — ere it was too late, ere that sin 
became inveterate — you would conquer it. In general 
you had been doing badly at school, now you were 
determined to do better. Such were the promises you 
had made to those who loved you, and you meant, 
or half-meant, or thought that you half-meant, 
to fulfil them. And such were the promises which, 
when you came back here, you renewed to us, 
and at first, in spite of all past disappointments, we 
almost fancied you would redeem them. But, alas ! it is 
so easy to promise, so difficult, for the weak-hearted, to 
perform. Why dwell on the old sad failure ? — the 
resolves which proved to be but a house built on the 
sand, — the goodness that vanished like the early dew ? 
Any interruption, however trivial — any accident, however 
slight — any passing disappointment, however insignifi- 
cant — yes, any thistle-down of poor excuse was enough 
for natural indolence to catch at ; — and if there was not 
even one poor, mean, shuffling excuse to shelter you, then 
the miserable " I cannot help it " of a weak and enervated 






xiil] THE PERIL OF WASTE. 123 

will was enough for you to drug the conscience with. 
You had learnt a wrong lesson, — you had been unlucky 
this week, — you had got interested in a novel, and it 
made you forget your work, — it was hardly worth trying 
till next week began, — and so on, and so on, — being 
virtuous only in the future, not in the present ; improving 
only in flaccid wishes, not in strong reality ; doing right 
only in maudlin dreams, not in manly effort ; meaning, 
in some dim, confused, drowsy way to be a good and 
noble boy, but being, indeed, a weak, feeble, unsatis- 
tory one, — until, in fact, you had ceased to care, and 
were content to be the poor slip-shod character which 
you knew you were, — always last, or nearly last in 
everything, never doing anything downright well, — 
discouraging the efforts made for you, disappointing the 
hopes formed of you, — even thus early in life preparing 
yourself to cumber the ground in God's fruitful vineyard 
— -a barren and a blighted tree. And what is the deep 
moral lesson which this sad, ever-recurring history 
implies ? It is one of the deepest, and one of the 
saddest of all lessons ; it is the moral law — aye, and the 
physical law too, — which is of all others, the most full 
of warning — viz., that our to-morrows are shaped with 
awful force by our yesterdays — that "our days are 
heritors of days gone by." Nor will it ever be known, 
I suppose, till the last great day how many men have 
spent the youth of life in making its manhood almost 
hopelessly miserable. You cannot learn then too early, by 
way of most solemn warning, — and I know not whether 
the lesson be most necessary for the youngest or for the 
eldest — that he who will but do his duty to-morrow 
does it too late, and is but too likely not to do it all 
There is a fatal force of growth in every bad habit, — a 
fatal continuity in human character, — so that any sin 



124 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

yielded to yesterday returns with more virulent influence 
to-day, and any sin not resisted to the very uttermost to- 
day, will return inevitably to-morrow with added insolence 
to master a weakened slave ; until, if God's grace be 
still resisted — to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow 
have made up the tale of a sinful, futile, degraded life, 
and placed you, reprobate, before that silent, solemn bar, 
at which each man shall receive the things done in the 
body, whether they have been good, or whether they 
have been evil. If such be the state, — if such be even 
the commencing state of any one of you who hear me 
this day, — if neither physically, nor morally, nor 
intellectually, you have been doing your duty, — if, 
instead of growing better and better, you are steadily and 
consciously growing worse and worse, — if over your 
soul is beginning to creep the chill of a fatal apathy, 
and the past-feelingness of a miserable despair, — then 
must we not to you alter the words of the text, not 
saying as Christ said to His faithful ones, " Gather up 
the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost, 5 ' — but 
rather alas ! with a more urgent insistency, " Gather up 
the fragments that remain, lest everything be lost " ? 

4. For everything is not yet quite lost. If, for instance, 
every word of instruction which you have heard from 
this place has been to you but as the sound of the idle 
wind — if on each Sunday, or each other day, after you 
have heard truths which so nearly concern the welfare 
of your soul, — a light word, a profane sneer, a conceited 
criticism, a recurring temptation, a careless habit, have 
been to you like those birds of the air in the Saviour's 
parable which take away good seed of God's Word from 
the trodden wayside of the hard and callous heart, — if 
on each Sunday after hearing the truths of God, spoken 
by His ordinance and in His name, you have but gone to 



xiii.J THE PEEIL OF WASTE. 125 

trifle, to jest, to please yourselves " without one sin 
brought to your remembrance, without one duty resolved 
upon, without one thought of your own weakness and 
Christ's strength," — only a little more impenetrable than 
before, only with the hard heart trodden a little harder 
— if so, then you have one more opportunity to-day. 
Oh, shall this fragment also be lost? will all of you 
reject to-day one more appeal of God to the sinful and 
unrepentant soul ? will not one return to His Father ? 
will not one pour into His ear the confessions of a 
wasted boyhood ? will not one, not one, make to Him, 
in secrecy and in silence, the resolves of a future life ? 

5. God grant His Holy Spirit to us, that it may be 
otherwise ! Thirteen weeks of this half-year are over ; 
but four still remain. Now I do not mean to conceal 
that the waste of past time makes all life a sad " might 
have been." None of you can in four remaining weeks 
regain the ground, whether moral and intellectual, which 
you may have lost in the thirteen past. There is no 
recalling those golden weeks that have gone neglected 
into the dark backward and abysm of time. The 
gleaning of the few ears which the hand of the reaper 
has dropped among the stubble cannot replace the 
harvest ; nor can we repair the lost vintage by gathering 
the scant grapes left here and there upon the topmost 
bough. It is the lesson that I have often taught which 
I must often teach again, that repentance is not inno- 
cence, though it is all that stands between the guilty 
soul and death. And that repentance must be our 
work, in the time that God yet gives. And when we 
remember what time is — how short, how uncertain, — 
then those words of St. Augustine acquire a deeper 
force, that Non progredi est regredi — that, in the spirit- 
ual life, non-progress is retrogression. For consider 



126 IN TEE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm 

that awful mystery of Time, — the Future not to be 
anticipated, the Past not to be recalled, only the Present 
ours ; and that Present, what is it ? An island ever 
encroached upon by the dark and swelling waves — a 
quicksand which ever swallows the place where last we 
trod — the flowing water of a river which is already far 
upon its way to the great sea. Even while we speak, it 
was and is not. . For ever — never. It passes away with 
every ticking of the clock ; with every beating of the 
heart; with every breath of articulated air. Yet how 
priceless ! In it alone we live. With it alone can we 
purchase eternity. It perishes and is recorded. .And 
though we waste, — nay, waste is a slight word — though 
we abuse, fling away, squander, kill it now, may not the 
hour come to us as to the great English Queen crying in 
her deathbed agony, " Oceans of money for one drop of 
time " ? Well, though we misuse, though we waste it, — 
silently, and patiently, whether we will live or die, 
silently and patiently, to the last, — God gives it us, until 
(it may be) it shall be suddenly withdrawn. And then ? 
And then, for the sin of all waste, — wasted money, 
wasted hours, wasted affections, wasted health, wasted 
opportunities, for every wasted boyhood, for every wasted 
manhood, — we must give account. Then shall the 
Voice say, " Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou 
mayest be no longer steward." I gave thee a body full 
of strength and health,— how is it enfeebled by folly 
and excess ? I gave thee a mind, capable of making 
thee wise and noble, — why is it like the sluggard's garden, 
full of thorns ? I gave thee a life which might have 
been a blessing to thy fellow men, — why have its powers 
been guiltily neglected or guiltily squandered ? Why is 
it like grass upon the housetops wherewith the mower 
filleth not his hand, nor he- that gathereth the sheaves 



xin.] THE PERIL OF WASTE. 127 

his bosom ? Oh when these questions are asked — when 
the books are opened — when the dead are judged — 
when thou art weighed in the balances and found 
wanting — when thou standest speechless before the All- 
seeing eye of God — when " Mercy has played her part, 
and Justice leaps upon the stage " — and many glittering 
faces of the holy and the pure look down upon thy 
degradation, — ? 

6. But oh may that great and dreadful moment never 
be to any of us ! In that day may we stand fearless 
before the adversary, penitent, redeemed, cleansed 
sanctified, in the white robe of Christ's righteousness. 
It may be so. In giving us time God gives us all. Still 
God makes the great sun shine upon us day by day, — 
still, morning, by morning, He causes another day, — a 
day unstained, — to dawn for us out of His eternity. Still 
morning by morning His hand holds forth to us a green 
leaf from the tree of life. Such a day is this. Oh, 
waste it not ! Is there a good impression that you have 
suffered to grow faint ? Is there a holy practice which 
you have long neglected ? Have you an offended 
friend who is still unreconciled ? a temper still un- 
checked ? a besetting sin still unresisted ? oh here is 
work for you to-day. " Watch against that which, in 
your better heart, with your truer self you desire not to 
do ; watch for the thing which you feel you ought to 
do ;" go back to your life from this sermon, from this 
warning of God to your souls, a little thoughtfully; 
and if you find yourself failing in your weakest point, 
slipping insensibly, were it but in thought into your 
besetting temptation, kneel at once upon your knees, 
ask pardon for it, and help to shun it in the future. 
Make, by God's grace, now — even now and here — a 
higher purpose, and ask for grace to keep to that purpose ; 



128 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [seem. xiii. 

humbly remembering that you must take the difficulty 
of the upward path as grave punishment to be patiently 
borne for going downwards. So gather up the fragments 
that remain, lest all be lost. Now is the accepted time, 
now is the day of salvation. Who knows whether for 
you it may be true even to the very letter that " From 
this very moment hangs eternity ! " 

Nov. 17, 1872. 






SERMON XIV. 

GALLING THINGS BY THEIR WRONG NAMES. 

Is. v. 20. 

" Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil ; that put darkness 
for light, and light for darkness ; that put bitter for sweet, and 
sweet for bitter ! " 

I did not seek for this text ; it comes naturally and 
prominently before us in the first Lesson of the day. I 
did not seek it, because it is couched in the language of 
denunciation and reproof, and I would far rather that 
you associated the teachings of this chapel with gentler, 
more soothing, more ennobling influences. It would be 
my wish that, in future years, Marlborough boys, if 
they ever recall what was said to them from this pulpit, 
should connect it with thoughts of peace, and joy, and 
hope, and the words of Him whose precepts were 
beatitudes, rather than with the terrors and thunderings 
of the fiery law. When our first parents were inno- 
cent and happy the voice of God, in accents that made 
them yet happier, floated for them under the trees of 
Paradise upon the evening wind ; and even so would 
we wish God's messages to come to you. Eeproof and 
denunciation, distasteful as they ever must be, have 
indeed their office. The Word of God is something 
more than a very pleasant song ; it is sometimes a fire 
to scathe, a hammer to dash in pieces, a sword to divide 
m. s. K 



130 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. |_serm. 

the soul and spirit, the joints and marrow ; and we 
should be guilty if we were ever murmuring, Peace, 
Peace, were there no peace ; guilty if, when it were 
needed, we shrank from ever saying anything which 
might tend to pierce the slumbering conscience, or 
agitate the stagnant soul. But I believe — I say it 
in no conventional or flattering spirit — I feel confident 
that I am speaking to right-minded and Christian boys ; 
to those whose hearts — amid many sins doubtless, 
and many failings — are yet not hard, and who will 
accept the language of kindly warning, with no need 
for the stern anathema, or the prophetic woe. I would 
not, therefore, use this text as though I said, " Woe to 
some of you, for some of you call evil good, and good 
evil ; " but rather would I warn you to beware lest any 
of you should subtly and insensibly slide into the 
treason of those who do so, and against whom the 
prophet utters the dread judgment that " as the fire 
devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the 
chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their 
blossom shall go up as dust." 

I. What then is this sin against which I would warn 
each and all of you to be, now and ever, on your guard ? 
It is the sin of disregarding — aye, and even of in the 
least degree underrating — the eternal distinctions of 
right and wrong; of putting darkness for light, and 
light for darkness, bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter ; 
it is, in one word, the sin of viewing things in their wrong 
aspects, of calling things by their wrong names. " He 
that saith unto the wicked ' Thou art righteous/ " says 
Solomon, a him shall the people curse." "He that 
justifieth the wicked," he says elsewhere, "and he that 
condexnneth the just, even they both are an abomina- 
tion to the Lord." More even than this, there are 






xiv.] GALLING THINGS BY WRONG NAMES. 131 

some things — as St. Paul tells us — which ought not 
so much as to be named among those who would live 
holy lives. To talk, otherwise than sadly and seriously 
of sin, is sin. " Oh, it was only a light word," you say. 
Yes, but there are times and states of the human soul 
on which even a light word may produce an effect 
which seems strangely and terribly disproportionate. 
The spark of fire which sets miles of rolling prairie in 
furious blaze, — the breath of wind stirring the few snow- 
flakes which before they reach the valley are a roaring 
avalanche, — these too are light matters : even so the 
tongue is a little member, but, as St. James impetuously 
says, " it setteth on fire the whole course of nature, and 
is set on fire of hell." The evil word — and oh, remem- 
ber this — is a step, a long step beyond the evil thought; 
and it is a step toward the precipice's edge. It fixes, it 
defines, it acknowledges, it embodies, it consents to the 
inward wrong. The king, in the great tragedy of that 
our poet, who, of all men that ever lived, saw deepest 
into the heart of man, thinks of murder, wishes to 
commit murder, has his heart and conscience full of 
murder, yet dare not commit murder, solely because as 
yet he dare not utter the word. 

" I had a thing to say, 
But I will fit it with some better time. 
I had a thing to say, but let it pass." 

The sunlight prevents him from saying it. Evil deeds 
are secret, clandestine; they court concealment, they 
love darkness ; " Or," he continues to the man whom he 
is trying to corrupt, 

" Or, if that thou could'st see me without eyes, 
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply 
Without a tongue, using conceit alone, 
Without eyes, ears, or harmful sound of words ; 
Then would I in thy bosom pour my thoughts, 
But ah! I will not." 

K 2 



132 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

And when the deed is, as he thinks, done, and only its 
guilt, and bitterness, and ruin remain, — when he finds 
that, like all sinners, he has sold himself for nought, 
and the Juries begin " to take their seats upon the mid- 
night pillow," then he complains of his accomplice, and, 
so far, complains of him justly, for having been weak, 
for having met him half-way, for having understood 
too easily — as weakness does — his guilty purpose. 

" Hadst thou but shook thy head or made a pause, 
Or bade me tell my tale in express words, 
Deep shame had struck me dumb. — 
But thou didst understand me by my signs, 
And didst in signs again parley with sin. 
Yea, without stop, didst let thy heart consent, 
And, consequently, thy rude hand to act 
The deed that both our tongues held vile to name." 

Here you see how well our great dramatist recognised 
the moral phenomenon that vice will always try either 
to get rid altogether of any verbal acknowledgment, or 
to hide itself in words which involve a plausible eu- 
phemism or a latent jest. The language of vice is 
twofold : — the one so cynically brutal, so irredeemably 
depraved, that the merest tincture of education makes 
it impossible, and its deformed words are heard only 
in " that common grey mist composed of crime, night, 
hunger, vice, and falsehood, which is the high noon of 
the wretched." But this is a kind of hideous shame- 
lessness, which is quenched not by religion, but by 
culture ; and it is perhaps even less dangerous than 
those viroKopiG-fiara — to use a word for which the 
truthful genius of the English language has no equi- 
valent — those false words, I mean, prankt in virtue's 
garb, to which sentimental corruption and cultivated 
vice resorts. Usually, when it has some wicked thing 
to utter, or some wicked action to excuse, language, 



xiv.] CALLING THINGS BY WRONG NAMES. 133 

lying in wait to murder truth and righteousness, 
" disguises itself in the vestibule." Speak of a sin in 
its true terms, and you strip it of its seductiveness. 
Call a vice by its real name, and you rob it of half 
its danger, by exposing all its grossness. The very 
guiltiest of sinners is he. who paints the gates of hell 
with Paradise, he who supplies to wickedness the mask 
and the tinsel of such deceptive speech as hides its 
native and repulsive ugliness. It has always been the 
characteristic of the worst ages thus to gloze over 
wicked things by indifferent titles. The great Greek 
historian, as some of you know, points it out as the 
surest sign of utter degradation in his own troubled day, 
that men spoke of virtues as if they were vices, and of 
vices as if they were virtues. " They altered," he says, 
" at their will and pleasure the customary meaning of 
words in reference to actions." They branded prudent 
caution as mean procrastination ; they glorified reckless 
audacity as social courage ; if a man was calm he was 
taunted with cowardice, and if he were brutal he was be- 
lauded for manliness. Yes, strange to say, men are more 
ashamed of base names than they are of base deeds. 
And do boys at school know nothing like this ? Is there 
not, even here, something analogous to this ? Have you 
never, for instance, heard a very mild term, a term in- 
volving no reprobation, applied to certain forms of 
taking what is not our own, which a plain man would 
call " stealing " ? Have you never heard jesting names for 
forms of untruthfulness, which a plain man would call 
" a lie " ? Have you never heard a base, soft, spurious, 
effeminate fancy arrogate to itself, and degrade by that 
glozing usurpation, the noble, holy name of friendship \ 
Have you never heard the conduct of a boy, who has 
acted dishonestly in an examination, described by a word 



134 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

much less unpleasant, far more apologetic, than the true, 
sincere word, " that he has been cheating " ? — or again, 
in the opposite direction, have you never heard names 
of clear disparagement, names full of the dislike which 
vice feels to virtue, given to scrupulous honour, to steady 
diligence, to stainless purity ? Oh, beware, then, as the 
text bids you, beware of ever thus calling evil good, or 
good evil ! If you would be true to yourselves, true to 
your neighbour, true to God, never suffer yourselves to 
use one word which sneers at the difficulty of a virtue, 
or slurs the odiousness of a vice. Even an honest, fear- 
less English boy will cease to see clearly the distinctions 
of right and wrong, if for the current coin of sincere 
and truthful language, there be palmed off upon him the 
false and adulterated counters of those words which 
come from the devil's mintage. Use true names. Let 
it be understood that here, and among you, — as pure- 
minded and honourable English boys — the liar, if such 
should ever obtrude among us — which God forfend — but 
if such should ever obtrude among us, the liar shall be 
the liar, and the cheat a cheat, and the thief a t.hief, 
and unclean unclean. And as a necessary part of this 
subject let me earnestly warn you against an error into 
which even good boys might fall — the error of supposing 
that ridicule is a proper engine wherewith to encounter 
sin. 

My brethren, you would shudder if you saw another 
doing what would maim his body ; will you laugh at 
what may be the headlong destruction of his soul? 
Believe me, it is wrong to jest at that which you should 
exterminate, and laugh at that which you should loathe. 
You who love the Lord, be sure that laughter may be 
the right cure for venial follies, but that it is a repro- 
bation not serious enough for so deadly a thing as sin. 



xiv.] CALLING THINGS BY WRONG NAMES. 135 

If by a meaning smile, if by a passing allusion, if in 
mere inuendo, you betray to another your consciousness 
that he is doing wrong, and do not at the same time 
make him see your disapproval of the wrong — if need 
be, your hatred of the wrong, your horror of the wrong, 
your indignation at the wrong, — your determination, if 
need be, to expose and put down the wrong — then (be 
not deceived) you consent to the wrong. For this, if it 
be not treason, is the scarcely less heinous crime of 
misprison of treason, against God. You almost become 
a participator in his wrong doing. Bather abstain from 
every appearance of evil ; rather put away from among 
yourselves that wicked person: at least, let your language 
to all be unmistakable in its clearness ; at least remem- 
ber that " By thy words shalt thou be justified, and by 
thy words thou shalt be condemned." 

II. I have spoken of the sin, let me now say a few 
words about its cause. It is due, my brethren, to a 
fading appreciation of moral evil ; a tampering with it, 
a destruction of that healthy instinct which revolts at 
it. It is the very nature of sin, that the more we know 
of it, the less we know it ; the more we are familiar 
with it, the less do we understand its vileness. 

" Oh ! he was innocent," 

says the poet, 

" And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom." 

With what marvellous power is this truth indicated in 
one of the oldest fragments of the world's history, the 
third chapter of the Book of Genesis. Our first parents 
are innocent, and therefore they are noble, they are 
happy, they hear the Call of God as they sit under the 
palms of Baradise. But, alas ! Eve lingers near the 



136 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

forbidden tree, and near the forbidden tree lurks ever 
the Serpent-tempter ; and then, step by step, little by- 
little, not shocking the soul at once, but alluring it 
imperceptibly, comes first the subtle insinuation of the 
doubt, " Tea, hath God said ? " then the bold scepticism, 
" Thou shalt not surely die," and then the guilty ad- 
miration of " the fruit pleasant to the eyes," and then 
the guilty longing for it as " a fruit to be desired to 
make one wise," and then the guilt itself — the guilty 
stretching forth of the disobedient hand, the guilty 
plucking of the fruit ; and then very rapidly the worst, 
last, most odious, least pardonable consequence, the 
tempting of others to the same sin; and then the sin 
is over. Yes, the sin is over, but not the issues of it ; 
not the horrible glare of inward illumination ; the 
opening of the eyes; the agony of guilty shame; the 
Awful Voice ; the vain hiding from detection ; the con- 
scious nakedness ; the feeble, lying excuses, and trying 
to throw the blame on others ; the lost Eden ; the pain, 
the toil, the sorrow ; the memory of life reduced to a 
bitter sigh ; the melancholy looking for of ashes to ashes, 
dust to dust. 

" 'Twas but a little drop of sin 
We saw this morning enter in, 
And lo ! at eventide the world is drowned ! " 

Oh, my brethren, now and always let it be your most 
earnest endeavour to keep your moral instincts right and 
true. Never let them be disguised by sentiment; never 
let them be obliterated by self-indulgence, never let 
them be sophisticated by 'lies. Do not think that 
light words and careless thoughts about them will be 
indifferent, and will leave you unaffected by them. 
Ci Character," as is said by our latest moralist, " is not 



xiv.] CALLING THINGS BY WRONG NAMES. 137 

cat in marble— it is not something solid and unalterable, 
it is something living and changing, and may become 
diseased, as our bodies do." You learn here, in season 
and out of season, line upon line, precept upon precept, 
here a little and there a little, — that obedience, diligence, 
honesty, truth, kindness, purity, are your duties to God 
and man. You know that this teaching is right and 
true, and that, in time and in eternity, your happiness 
depends thereon. Oh never lose sight of it ! Say to 
yourselves, constantly, that this is good, and that is 
evil; this the noble course, that the base; this right, 
that wrong ; this your duty and happiness, that your 
ruin and curse. Oh choose your side in the battle of 
life, and be not found on the wrong side. Abhor that 
which is evil, cleave to that which is good. 

III. — For, lastly, as you have heard the sin, and its 
cause, so in very few words hear its punishment. That 
punishment is nothing less than the failure of all life ; — 
the waste, the loss, the shipwreck of the human soul; — the 
sapping of every moral force and every vital instinct ; — 
for " as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame 
consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rotten- 
ness, and their blossom shall go up as dust : because 
they have cast away the law of the Lord of Hosts, and 
despised the word of the Holy One of Israel." How 
powerful is the metaphor ! The rose is a glorious flower, 
yet how often have you seen a rose-tree shrivelled^ 
withered, blasted, producing nothing but mouldering 
and loathly buds ; — why ? Because there is some poison 
in the sap, or some canker at the root. Have you never 
seen it so ? Have you never seen careers that might have 
been very happy, very innocent, very prosperous — cut 
short, blighted, in disgrace ? And that is sad enough ; 
but alas ! there is something much sadder : there is the 



138 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xiv. 

paralysis of the conscience, the searing as with a hot 
iron of the very faculty whereby we discriminate 
between right and wrong. As the Israelites preferred 
the wretched slavery and reeking fleshpots of Egypt 
to the manna, which was angels' food ; as the pure, 
delicious water is loathsome to the scorched palate of 
the drunkard : so do these in their depraved souls learn 
at last, not merely to call evil good and good evil, but 
also to put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. " Like 
natural brute beasts/' they have lost the distinctions 
between right and wrong. That is a powerful and 
tragic line of the Eoman satirist : — 

" Virtutem videant, intahescantque relicta." 

Let them see virtue, and pine for it, now that it is 
beyond their reach. But it is a worse stage still not 
even to see, not even to pine for it ; as there is hope for 
the wound that throbs with agony, but none for that 
which has mortified to painlessness. And this is death. 
This is the worst woe that can befall finally those who 
have learnt to call things by their wrong names — to 
call evil good, and good evil. " How easy," says a 
Christian poet, and it may well sum up some of the 
lessons of to-day : 

' ' How easy to keep free from sin ; 
How hard that freedom to recall ! 
For dreadful truth it is, that men 
Forget the heavens from which they fall." 1 

Dec. 8, 1872. 

1 Coventry Patmore. 



SERMON XV. 
COUNTERBALANCE EVIL WITH GOOD. 

Rom. xii. 21. 
" Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." 

You have heard these words in the Epistle of to-day, 
and yon will remember that their first application is to 
that spirit of gentleness and brotherly kindness, that 
noble willingness to forget ourselves and to live for the 
good of others, which, in the long run, triumphs over 
malignity itself. Take less than your due, St. Paul 
says ; think lowly of yourselves ; be not resentful of 
injuries ; if others act wrongly or unkindly, revenge 
yourselves by a generosity which will win over all but 
the basest natures, and which, even if it does not win 
them, will ennoble you. 

But the words of my text have a wider and richer 
bearing, and believing that St. Paul would be the first 
to rejoice that they should be accepted in their very 
fullest significance, I urge you to-day, on this first 
Sunday of a new term, to take as your wise and constant 
motto this exhortation : " Be not overcome of evil, but 
overcome evil with good." 

1. " Be not overcome of evil : " those words, you see, 
contain at once a warning of danger and an encourage- 
ment to resistance. They assume, as all Scripture does 



140 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

— and it is an assumption well worthy of our deepest 
and most serious attention — that there is such a thing 
as evil, that it is around us, that contact with it is 
inevitable, that defeat and ruin by it are not impossible. 
It would be a shallow and a false philosophy, it would 
be a treacherous and apostate religion, which should 
attempt to conceal this from you, or to tell you that the 
hard, narrow, up-hillward path to heaven is smooth, and 
easy, and strewn with roses. I know that this is what 
the worldly wisdom of this age is doing more and more. 
Men more and more shut their eyes against all that is 
dangerous and disagreeable, in the thought of righteous- 
ness, temperance, and the judgment to come. " Speak to 
us smooth things," they say, " prophesy deceits." Let 
your teaching be as a pleasant song which shall not 
wake the slumber of the soul, or dispel the enchantments 
of the sense. Boldly bid us trust in the lying words that 
God will not punish, that redemption is a " boundless 
infinitude of mercy and reckless obliteration of the 
work of sin ; " or speak to us rather as if there were no 
sin ; as if earth were our only heaven ; as if time were 
the only eternity ; as if death meant annihilation ; as if 
pleasure were godliness ; as if the body were the soul ; 
as if to think our own thoughts, and speak our own 
words, and walk in our own ways, were lawful and 
right, and to eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. 
And this is especially the fatal sophistry of those who 
have been overcome of evil. It only vexes them to be 
told that life, if it be true life, must be a fight, a strife, 
an agony, a service under a captain's banner in time of 
war, where carelessness is danger, and sleep is death. 
More gladly would they drug their consciences into 
stupefaction by believing that there is nothing irreconcil- 
able between the world and Christ, as if the promptings 



xv.] COUNTERBALANCE EVIL WITH GOOD. 141 

of the flesh and the devil were but in reality the voice 
of nature and of God. But even the heathen had got 
beyond this; they knew the eternal distinctions of 
right and wrong ; they knew that there were good and 
noble things for which men must struggle, and base, 
seductive things to which they must not yield. They 
knew that if man could not perish, he must by every 
effort, and at every hazard, refuse the evil and choose 
the good. Oh, learn, every one of you, even the youngest, 
that life is no long holiday, no sunny playing-field. He 
who has learnt to look without at the fearful phenomena 
of nature, he who has learnt to realise what agonies of 
mental and physical torture he himself — aye, every one 
here present — may in God's Providence be called upon 
to undergo before death comes ; he who from Scripture, 
or from conscience, or from history, or from experience, 
has seen what possibilities of infamy, what capacities for 
crime, lurk, like glaring monsters in the sunless caverns 
of the human heart — he knows that one of those lessons 
which God repeats to him with daily warning is, that, 
to the best and noblest, life is a serious and a difficult 
thing; but that to the careless, the idle, the sensual, 
the disobedient, life is a scene of danger in which the 
soul may sink into present misery and everlasting death. 
2. So much, my brethren, as a warning of peril 
which God would not have us neglect ; but now we have 
the command, which command is itself the most power- 
ful encouragement to resistance. Though physical and 
moral evil are closely and most mysteriously united, 
though sin and sorrow walk this world hand in hand, 
yet in one respect they are wholly separate. Physical 
evil may crush, but moral evil can alone contaminate. 
From physical evil we must, from moral we need not, 
suffer. Pain, sickness, bereavement, disappointment, 



142 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

malice — these we must experience, but not necessarily 
vice, or guilt, or shame. These if admitted into our 
nature must be admitted by our own act. The City of 
Mansoul, if taken, can only be taken by treachery 
from within. We must meet with evil, but we need not 
touch it — we must experience temptation, but we need 
not yield to it — we must be assaulted by wrong, but we 
need never be defeated by it. "We, like our Blessed 
Lord before us, must be driven into the wilderness of 
life to be tempted of the devil ; but, though he may 
alter our circumstances, he can never control our will. 
He can place us on the topmost pinnacle of the Temple, 
but there he can only say to us, " Cast thyself down." 
He cannot cast us down. If we fall, we fall by our own 
apostasy ; and if we stand, as stand we may by faith 
and prayer, then shall thousands of volant angels bear 
us down upon their wings, and sing heavenly anthems 
of our victory. 

" Also it is written, 
Tempt not the Lord thy God : He said, and stood ; 
But Satan, smitten by amazement, fell. " 

3. My brethren, this warning of danger, this encourage- 
ment to resistance, concerns us all very nearly this day. 
In coming back to school, or in coming, as many of you 
do, for the first time to school, you are coming to a new 
scene, and to one which necessarily, and inevitably, and 
under the very best and most favourable of circumstances, 
is a scene of greater and more serious temptation than 
that which you have left. How nearly then it concerns 
you to know and feel that you will meet with no danger 
which will really compromise your moral safety, that 
God will send you no temptation without sending you 
also the way to escape. Eemember, then, that if you fall 
or go astray, the guilt will be not in your circumstances, 



xv.] COUNTERBALANCE EVIL WITH GOOD. 143 

but in yourselves. Never say, " If I had not left home, 
I should never have forgotten God," or " If I had been 
somewhere else, I should not have fallen into this 
or that sin." Perhaps not; but you would assuredly 
have fallen into others. This is an excuse which is 
never listened to even before the bar of earthly 
justice; think you that it will be before His bar 
who can read the inmost secrets of the heart? God, 
we may be sure, hates feeble excuses as much as 
the best men do. Oh, all of you, depend on this, 
and learn this lesson this morning, for it is as stead- 
fast as the throne of God, that if you, — any single 
boy among you, — will, ia beginning the career of life, 
listen to the Voice of God, if he will keep himself aloof 
from the enticement of bad companions, if he will never 
suffer the inmost shrine of his heart to be darkened by 
removing from it that holy lamp of conscience which 
God has placed upon the altar there, if he will steadily, 
and by honest self-examination, set before him his duties 
and his dangers, if he will pray to God out of a pure 
heart fervently, and not walk after his own under- 
standing, then, amid the treacherous assaults of evil, and 
the fiery darts of opposition, yea, in the very midst of 
the burning fiery furnace of his enemies, he shall be as 
safe as though the Wing of God were over him. Such 
a boy shall not greatly fall, or if, through the weakness 
of his mortal nature, for a moment he ever fall, he shall 
say at once, " Eejoice not over me, Satan, mine enemy, 
for if I fall I shall rise again." Innocence is one thing, 
virtue is another. That innocence which is but the child's 
sweet ignorance of evil cannot last ; but when the limpid 
transparence of that fair and fragile crystal is sullied it 
may be more firmly replaced by the no less clear, but 
more solid adamant of virtue. Yes, on the one hand, 



144 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

be sure of this, — that were the temptations of any school 
ten thousand times worse than they are, a good and 
God-fearing boy may stand unscathed and happy in the 
midst of them ; and that, on the other hand, a soul that 
is weak, a soul that is bad, a soul that is not sincere 
may be sheltered all its life long in the sweetest and 
purest of Christian schools, or even of Christian homes, 
— may be girt round with an infinitude of care and ten- 
derness, may be placed where the temptations to evil are 
few, and the incentives to good are manifold, — yet that 
soul will perish and be ruined, because, anywhere and 
everywhere, the powers of evil will find their affinities 
with the weakness and treachery within. To our first 
parents the school of evil was Paradise itself. Esau 
was bred in the noble simplicity of the Patriarch's tent ; 
the sons of Eli within the curtains of God's bright 
sanctuary ; Manasses in the pure palace of a royal saint ; 
Judas among the chosen ones of the heavenly kingdom, 
and in daily intercourse with the Son of God Himself. 
Yet what became of them ? Esau grew into a coarse, 
sensual hunter ; the sons of Eli were sons of Belial ; 
Manasses was a foul apostate ; and for Judas, the thief, 
the traitor, the son of perdition, it were better that he 
had not been born. So you see, it is God's will that 
man should be liable everywhere to the possibilities of 
evil ; — but " resist the devil, and he will flee from you." 
4. The rest of the verse tells you how you may best 
do this ; it gives you the method of victory — " Be not 
overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." Aim 
at that which is good, — cleave to that which is good, — 
occupy your time with that which is good, — fill your 
thoughts with that which is good, — and the assaults of 
evil will have lost half their power. An earnest em- 
ployment — a steady purpose in life — a diligent use of 



xv.] COUNTERBALANCE EVIL WITH GOOD. 145 

time — these are an irresistible panoply against wicked- 
ness, these strike out of the devil's hands his worst 
implements of temptation. You will remember that 
terrible touch in one of the Lord's sternest parables, 
about the evil spirit returning to the house whence he 
came out, and finding it "empty, swept, and garnished," 
— then goeth he and taketh to himself seven other 
spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and 
dwell there, and the last state of that man is worse than 
the first. What does that " empty, swept, and gar- 
nished " mean ? It means that if your heart is not 
pre-occupied with good, it will be invaded by evil. Oh, 
beware of idleness in its every form, idle procrastina- 
tions, idle talk, idle habits, idle thoughts, these are the 
certain ruin of the soul. The labourer who stands idle 
in the marketplace is ever ready to be hired in the 
devil's service. The worm of sin gnaws deepest into the 
idle heart. Never will it be known, till the last great 
day, how many souls have been shipwrecked on the rock 
of an idle hour. But pre-occupy your heart with good ; 
pre-occupy your time with honest industry, and you 
are safe. Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, 
lovely, of good report, if there be any virtue, if there 
be any praise, think on these things. Evil can as little 
encroach on the domain of good as darkness can force its 
way into the circle of radiance which a lamp flings into 
the night. Eemember that since all sin begins in thought, 
if your thoughts are safe then you are safe. "When 
our chalice is filled with holy oil, it will entertain none 
of the waters of bitterness." When the air is filled 
with sunlight there is no opportunity for the deeds of 
darkness. Where the soul has tasted of the bread of 
life, it cannot hunger for the stones of the wilderness. 
Where God is all to us, the world is nothing. If any 

M, S. L 



146 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of you have honestly tried, as you think, to encounter 
evil hand to hand, and have failed, because it has 
seemed to have you at a disadvantage, now try another 
and a better way, try now to draw into some innocent 
and useful channel that life which gives to evil all its 
strength. The sure way to overcome the evil is to 
develop, and feed, and fortify the good. In the case 
of the worst boy or the worst man, there lingers, 
unextinguished, a spark of heavenly fire. Every one 
of you has a good, a God-like, an eternal element 
within you — oh cherish these. The freer life of but 
one good impulse is the death-warrant to many guilty 
ones. Counterbalance that which is base, and disobe- 
dient, and degraded within you by the opposing weight 
of that which is holy and divine. Israel overcame the 
fiery serpents, not by gazing at and struggling with 
them, but by averting their gaze, and fixing their eyes 
on the brazen serpent ; this was their true deliverance, 
and our true deliverance will be to consider the Apostle 
and High Priest of our profession, the life and example 
of our Saviour Christ. To His service you are dedi- 
cated ; into His name you were , baptized ; to Him 
many of you have renewed, many will this term renew, 
the vow of their allegiance. Oh, all will be easy to 
you if you will follow in His steps. In every sense 
and by every influence — by creation, by preservation, by 
redemption, by adoption — you are the children of God. 
God loves you, Christ died for you, the Spirit strengthens 
you, It is true that without, and still more dangerously 
within, you, a great battle is going on; Gerizim and 
Ebal, blessing and cursing, good and evil, light and 
darkness, life and death are struggling for the possession 
of your souls. Oh, which shall gain them? If your 
heart be right with God, if you are humble and faithful, 



xv.] COUNTERBALANCE EVIL WITH GOOD. 147 

if you watch and pray, you are as safe now, as safe for 
ever, as safe here, as safe anywhere, as though the whole 
blue heaven were one great shield held on the Arm of 
God above your heads. As we kneel down now, at the 
end of this sermon, let us all pray that so we may live, 
so die ; pray that each and all of us may be not slothful 
in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, — pray 
that this place may grow dearer and dearer to everyone 
of us, because we may feel more and more that God is 
here, — pray that honest, simple, faithful duty may be 
the guiding star of all our lives, — pray that we may all 
be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one 
another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven us. 
Yes, pray each for himself, and each for all- — you for us, 
and we for you — that God may be with us ; that His 
love may ever glide like a fiery pillar before us through 
the wilderness of life ; that whether we have yielded 
before, or whether we have resisted, henceforth at any 
rate by His blessing we may not be overcome of evil, 
but overcome evil with good, 

January, 1873. 



L 2 



SEKMON XVI. 
THINKING OF GOD. 

1 Tim. iv. 15. 

" Meditate upon these things ; give thyself wholly to them ; that thy 
profiting may appear to all." 

Although not taken from the Epistle of the day, this 
text sums up one of its numerous lessons. The Epistle 
of St. James is intensely practical. It has offended 
those who confine the Christian religion to a series of 
beliefs. Even Luther, carried away by passion and 
prejudice, spoke of it as "a mere epistle of straw." 1 
But he who begins with contempt will never end 
with insight. No Scripture is of private interpretation. 
It needs for its study at once a large and a humble 
heart, a heart too large to be taken in by the empty 
sciolism of much that calls itself criticism ; too humble 
to mistake for the light of heaven the vaporous gleam of 
those rash and delusive judgments which rise too often 
from the marshes of an undisciplined intellect and an 
unspiritual life. No doubt St. James dwells on the 
value and necessity of holy works, but such works are 
alike the fruit and the test of faith, and St. Paul, whom 
St. James is supposed to controvert, would have been as 
glad to have subscribed to the emphatic utterance of 
his brother apostle, that " faith without works is dead, 
being alone," as St. James would have been to adopt 

1 " Ein recht strohern Epistel." 



serm. xvi.] THINKING OF GOD. 149 

the watchword of the Epistle to the Eomans — t{ We are 
justified by faith." 

The Epistle of St. James is then "a noble protest 
against laxity of morals/' a protest against imagining 
ourselves to hold the truths of the Gospel while we 
neglect its principles and violate its laws. He speaks 
with all the uncompromising plainness of an honest 
nature, and all the passionate force of a kindling indig- 
nation against the sins which were in his days a blot on 
the character of those who professed the faith. Then, 
as now, there was a greed of gain, a yielding to the 
narrow fascinations of avarice, which made men forget 
that the life was more than meat, and which, by robbing 
their characters of all ardour, of all generosity, of all 
nobleness, tended to give all their labours to the cater- 
pillar. Then, as now, was prevalent the sin and folly 
of the unbridled tongue, and so far from " speaking with 
an accent of heroic verity," men fawned, and flattered, 
and bit, and devoured, and wished other people dead. 
Then, as now, men deceived themselves into the fancy 
that a state of sin was a state of grace, that they could 
do without God, that formalism would be accepted in 
lieu of fruit ; or, if not, that God was a Being of such 
boundless facility that though He had written alike in 
nature, and in conscience, and in Scripture, wrath against 
unrepentant sin, He meant not wrath, but mercy. But 
all such beliefs St. James denounces as foolish : alike 
and false, and therefore his Epistle, so far from being, as 
Luther said, " pland straminea" is " verb aurea." So far 
from finding it valueless, it seems to me so pregnant in 
rich truths that even in the few verses of it read, to-day 
there is far more than could be treated of in a single 
sermon ; nor, with all its apparent simplicity, does it 
offer any exception to the saying of St. Augustine, 



150 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

" Marvellous, God, is the depth of Thy utterances ; like 
a great sea their smiling surface breaks into refreshing 
ripples at the feet of our little ones, but into its un- 
fathomable depth the wisest may gaze with the shudder 
of amazement and the thrill of love.'' 

This much, however, we may easily see in the Epistle, 
viz., that every error it denounces has its immediate 
root in selfishness, that every good work to which it 
exhorts demands some form or other of self-denial. 
And herein it will furnish us all with an easy text for 
answering the infinitely important question, — Am I, or 
am I not, doing the will of God ? Am I, or am I not, 
fulfilling the purpose of my life ? Is there, or is there 
not, any real connection between the name I bear and 
the life I lead ? Much, for instance, of our life is spent 
in speech, so that by our words we shall be justified, and 
by our words condemned. Now no boy can be unaware 
of the general character of his speech. Is he a profane 
and habitual swearer ? Does he talk of sacred things 
lightly ? Does he love to speak of things whereof it is 
a shame to speak ? Is he for ever complaining, mur- 
muring, defacing, defaming, sneering, backbiting, wound- 
ing with his tongue ? If so, he is deceiving himself, his 
religion is vain. Is he, on the other hand, kind and 
gentle ? does he, as the dearest law of his life, desire 
innocently, wisely, humbly to make others happy? 
Has he 

" The love 
By constant watching wise 
To meet the glad with joyful smile, 
And to wipe the weeping eyes, 
And a heart, at leisure from itself 
To soothe and sympathise ? " 

If not, he is yet a forgetful hearer, not a doer of the 
Word. Or, once more, what is his aim and object in 



xvi.] THINKING OF GOB. 151 

life ? Is it noble o-r ignoble ? Is it selfish or generous ? 
Is it to serve God, or to please himself? If it is all 
selfish and disobedient, then he is deceiving himself, 
his religion is vain. And how is it that men holding 
the faith can thus deceive themselves ? The apostle 
gives us the profound reason, on which for the remainder 
of our time I wish to dwell. It is because his recog- 
nition of God's truth is but like the careless glance 
which a man might give at the dim metal mirrors of 
those days, going away to forget immediately what 
manner of man he was, " But/' he adds, " whoso looketh 
into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, 
he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, 
this man shall be blessed in his deed." 

Now what the apostle means is clear, and what he 
here urges upon us is that very duty, to the neglect of 
which more than anything else is due the shallowness 
and imperfection of our lives. He means that a man's 
nature is insensibly but inevitably moulded by that 
which is in his thoughts, and that the lives, even of 
Christians, are often earthly and sensual because their 
thoughts are not with things above. Tell me about 
what you think most frequently and most earnestly, 
and I will tell you what you are. For your thoughts 
are the invisible influences which give its complexion to 
your life, even as the insect is coloured by the leaf on 
which it feeds. " Abeunt studia in mores" What a man 
desires to be, that he will be. If his thoughts are ever 
of sin he will be possessed of sin, he will be the slave 
of sin ; but if his thoughts are ever of God and the 
things of God, then * with open face, beholding, as in a 
glass, the glory of the Lord, he will be changed into 
the same image from glory to glory." 

If, then, you would live good or worthy lives, you 



152 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

must not only not suffer your thoughts to become guilty 
thoughts, but you must not even allow them to be 
vacant thoughts. You must fill them with all things 
true, pure, honourable, lovely, of good report. How can 
we best do this ? Best by forgetting ourselves, best by 
obliterating our own selfish will and pleasure, best by 
thinking wholly of others and of God ; for in the true 
life there are three factors — God, the soul, and our 
fellow men ; and our duty to ourselves, our duty to our 
own souls is best summed up in our duty to God and ! 
our duty to our fellow men. This is the lesson which 
I would desire to impress to-day, and it is a lesson for 
us all, from the youngest boy to the oldest man. 

I. Very few of us, I fear — very few even of the best 
of us — think enough of God. That He is our Creator, 
Preserver, Eedeemer, that He has the sole and absolute 
claim upon our love and obedience we all know ; but 
oh ! if we all knew this in a true and living sense, how 
different our lives might be ! By not thinking of it 
often enough, or deeply enough, how mighty a safeguard 
do we lose ! " Hear these three things/' said a Jewish >. 
rabbi, " and thou shalt eschew transgression : — the All- 
seeing eye, and the All-hearing ear, and that all thy 
actions are written in a book." How many a life has 
been kept humble, and happy, and pure, and sweet, by 
the living realisation of that one truth, "Thou, God, 
seest me." You know how you are affected, and made 
better in all your hearts, by the mere presence of some 
one to whom you can look up as good and true. You 
know that there are some even among your school- 
fellows so upright, so innocent, so single-hearted, that to 
be with them is to breathe a holier and more wholesome 
atmosphere. Their influence, something which seems 
to emanate from them and flow in upon your hearts, 



xvi.] THINKING OF GOD. 153 



surrounds you with the air of heaven as with the perfume 
from the waving of angels' wings. Their divine superiority 
to all that is impure or sordid seems to run liquid through 
your soul, so that you feel that could you always be 
with, them, you, too, would grow like them. But these, 
alas ! are rare in this world, nor can you often be with 
them ; nor even, were this possible, could they save 
your souls, or pay your debt to God. No ; but there is 
a Presence which not only may be always near you, but 
which you cannot escape ; there is a Love always over 
yon, which you may reject, but cannot alienate ; there 
is a Friend always with yon, who, even in your loneliest 
moments, leaves you not alone. He is a Friend living 
and true ; nor is He weak as we are, nor is He, as we 
are, ignorant of all the secrets of your hearts. That 
Presence, that Love, that Friend is God in Christ. Oh 
that you would all cling to His hand ! oh that now and 
ever you would listen to His voice ! What would I not 
give to impress upon you, as I feel it, that life without 
God is not life, but death ; so impress it upon you, by 
the aid of God's Holy Spirit, that every Marlborough 
boy who hears me might feel, for all his after days, 
" Much that I learnt at Marlborough I have forgotten : 
by much that I might have learnt I never profited ; but 
this, at least, I did learn, and this lesson, I trust, has so 
permeated my soul, so interpenetrated my whole being; 
that I cannot forget it if I would, that life without God 
is life without joy, without peace, without happiness, 
without hope; and that if I would live a life which 
shall come to anything — a life which shall not ' be cast 
as rubbish in the void, when God has made the pile 
complete ' — then I ought daily to offer unto God myself, 
my soul and body, a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice. 
I ought daily to pray to God with all my heart that 



154 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

prayer of St. Augustine, ( Serva me ah homine malo, i. e. a 
me ipso! " You will go forth into the world ; your lives 
will be in outward circumstances very various ; some of 
you will be rich, some very poor; some will be eminently 
prosperous, some very sorrowful ; and all these things 
are of no real consequence or importance, because all 

r these things are but for a moment : but the difference 
between the holy and the unholy life, the difference 
between the life with God and the life without God — 

\ that is the difference between the noon of a burning 

1 summer and a midnight without stars. 

II. But we can only think of God in relation to our 
own souls. The soul is no measure of God, and yet to 
us God can be reflected by the soul alone. Now we 
see through a glass darkly — it is only then that we 
shall see face to face. " Through the glass darkly," it 
has been beautifully said ; " but except through the glass 
in no wise. A tremulous crystal, waved as water, 
poured out on the ground ; you may defile it, despise it, 
pollute it, at your pleasure and at your peril ; for on the 
peace of these weak waves must all the heaven you 
shall ever gain be first seen ; and through such purity 
as you can win for those dark waves must all the light 
of the risen Sun of righteousness be bent down by faint 
refraction. Cleanse them and calm them as you love 
your life." But how shall the soul be conscious of that 
Sun if its own mists blot out its brightness ? A man 
may say, with Diagoras of old, that there is no God, or 
with Protagoras, that he cannot tell whether there is 
or not ; and for him there is no God : and he cannot tell 
whether there is or not. For the secret of the Lord is 
with them that fear Him, and He will show them His 
covenant ; but for those who fear Him not there is no 
secret ; and for them whose foolish hearts are darkened 



xvi.] THINKING OF GOD. 155 

no vision ; and for those who listen not, no voice. Do 
you ask how you shall hear His voice ? My brethren, 
you have heard it often, you do hear it daily, you have 
heard it from your earliest years. u When I was a little 
boy of four years old," says one who afterwards grew 
up to be a good and eminent and courageous man, 1 " one 
fine day in spring my father led me by the hand to a 
distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone, 
On the way I had to pass a little pond, then spreading 
its waters wide ; a rhodora in full bloom, a rare flower, 
which grew only in that locality, attracted my attention 
and drew me to the spot. I saw a little tortoise 
sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the 
flaming shrub ; I lifted the stick I had in my hand to 
strike the harmless reptile, for though I had never 
killed any creature yet, I had seen other boys out of sport 
destroy birds and squirrels and the like, and I felt a 
desire to follow their wicked example. But all at once 
something checked my little arm, and a voice within 
me said loud and clear, ' It is wrong !' I held my 
uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion, the con- 
sciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my 
actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished 
from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to 
my mother, and asked what it was that told me ' It was 
wrong/ She wiped a tear from her eye, and taking me in 
her arms said, ' Some men call it conscience, but I prefer 
to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you 
listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, 
and always guide you right ; but if you turn a deaf ear, 
or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and 
leave you in the dark without a Mend. Your life 
depends on heeding that little voice.' She went her 

1 Theodore Parker. 



I 



156 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

way/' he adds, " careful and troubled about many things, 
and doubtless pondered them in her motherly heart, while 
I went off to ponder and think of it in my poor childish 
way. But I am sure no event in my life has made so 
deep and lasting an impresion on me." Wise mother ! 
happy son ! Your life, too, depends on heeding that little 
voice, for that little voice is the still, small voice of God. 
If you will heed, if you will obey it, you may never 
hear it but in whispers of tenderness and warning love ; 
but if you disobey it, oh, with what tones of scorn and 
menace can it speak, what thunder-crashes of wrath 
and fear can it roll over the troubled sea of the evil 
soul. Have none of you ever been guilty of mean 
actions, which you knew to be mean, spoken wicked 
words knowing them to be wicked, done that which you 
would fain hide from every eye ? Ah ! have you never 
heard it then ? Yes, that voice is the voice of God. 
You may hush it, stifle it, defy it, drown it deep under 
rivers of iniquity, but all that is good and dear, all that 
is true and holy, all in your life which can raise man 
above beasts that perish, depends upon heeding that 
little voice. 

III. But thirdly, and lastly, in very few words, what 
will it bid you do ? Think of yourself? care only for 
your own soul? No ; but think of God, think how you 
may make your little life a help and blessing to your 
fellow men. There has been but one perfect life that has 
ever been lived on earth, and that was the life of Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God. And what is the briefest 
epitome of the working of that life ? Is it not that 
" He went about doing good " ? And what was the 
prevailing principle of that life ? Was it not " I must 
be about my Father's business"? Was it not "My 
meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish 



xvr.] THINKING OF GOD. 157 

His work"? Yes ; depend upon it that the path to a 
righteous and eternal life lies far more in thinking of 
God as the living source of all our duties, and of the 
world as the sphere in which those duties are to be 
performed, than in thinking only, or even mainly, of 
our own souls. But observe that we cannot serve man 
without loving God; our duty to the one must flow 
from, must be aided by, must be mingled with our duty 
to the other. When a good and wise modern philosopher 
summed up the law and duty of life in Altruism — Vive 
pour autrui — " Live for others " — he was guided by the 
same conception as that of the sweet and noble Hillel, 
the great president of the Jewish sanhedrin. Hillel and 
Shammai were the two most eminent of the Jewish 
rabbis in the days immediately preceding the days of 
Christ, and there is a celebrated story that a Pagan went 
to Shammai and asked him to tell him the whole law 
in one sentence and in one minute. Shammai angrily 
drove the man from his presence, and he then went to 
Hillel with the same demand. Hillel, with calm and 
unruffled temper, replied : " What thou wouldest that 
another should do to thee, that do thou to him ; this is 
the whole law : the rest is but commentary." Yet both 
these great teachers — the ancient and the modern — said 
but half the truth. It is quite true that 

' ' The high desire that others may be blest 
Savours of heaven ; " 

but I do not believe that that high desire can either 
be originated, or purified, or wisely acted on, apart from 
God and without the aid of God's Holy Spirit, freely given 
to them who seek Him. To know the whole truth we 
must go back to the immortal, wisdom of the Decalogue, 
of which the first table comprises the duty to God, as 
well as the second the duty to man, and we must go to 



158 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm.xvi. 

sit at the feet of our Saviour and hear Him explain it, 
when He says, " Thou shalt love God with all thy heart, 
and thy neighbour as thyself; on these two command- 
ments hang all the law and the prophets." In that rule 
all is included. God is there, humanity is there ; and 
to love God and to love man is the completeness of life 
and the salvation of the soul. He to whom God is the 
living law, he who has no dearer hope than to suffer all 
and sacrifice all, if thereby he may benefit others, 
he to whom life is communion, he to whom heaven 
means principle, oh ! there is no fear but his soul will 
be bound up in the bundle of life, no fear that God will 
not cherish it in that day when He maketh up His 
jewels. Go from this chapel with the humble, hearty 
prayer to God that you may love Him more, and keep 
Him more in all your thoughts, and that by doing this 
your lives, more than ever hitherto, may be unselfish 
lives, and lives devoted to making all about you better 
and happier; and by doing this you will be looking 
into the perfect law of liberty, and, not being a forget- 
ful hearer but a doer of the word, shall be blessed in 
your deed. 

May 18, 1873. 



SEEMON XVII. 
THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PRAYER. 

1 Kings iii. 5. 
" Ask what I shall give thee." 

Some of you will recognise that these words belong to 
the story of King Solomon. He had recently succeeded 
to his father's kingdom, and with royal swiftness and 
dauntless promptitude had crushed and swept away the 
guilt and opposition of dangerous schemers. Then, the 
moment that his throne was established, he went with 
Oriental pomp to the high palace of Gibeon, and after 
many a prayer and many a hecatomb for the future of 
that realm, whose fairest fields and cities he saw from 
that sacred hill, he retired to rest. And in the night 
he dreamed a dream, and knew that this dream was 
a reality. The God whom he had been worshipping 
came before him and said, "Ask what I shall give 
thee ; " and Solomon, reflecting the yearnings of the 
day in the visions of the night, asked God to give him 
a wise and understanding heart. He was but a boy — 
according to the Jewish historian he was but fifteen 
years old — and yet he was king over a great nation. 
He prayed for God's grace that he might govern them 
aright. And God, approving the petition, gave more 
Resides. Solomon had asked for wisdom, and God gave 



160 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. serm. 

him besides riches, and long-life, and victorious success. 
And why was Solomon's prayer so acceptable to God ? 
First, because to Him every true and faithful prayer is so 
acceptable ; and next because of all prayers He loveth 
best those that are wholly unselfish, those in whom 
all thoughts of self are absorbed and annihilated in 
thoughts of Him and of our fellow men. 

" Ask what I shall give thee." Had any man ever so 
splendid an opportunity ? It is not only all the king 
doms of the world and the glory of them, but it is that 
at no price of iniquity; it is that with no concurrent 
sorrow ; it is that with God's peace besides. There is 
no commoner field for the exercise of fancy than this ; 
and the tales of every land and age have imagined what 
man would desire if the powers of good, or the powers 
of evil, offered him a boundless choice. And it is one 
universal moral of all these tales that unless the choice 
come immediately from God, it were far better to make 
no such choice at all. Over and over again, in classic 
in mediaeval, in later stories men are supposed to sell 
themselves to the Evil Spirit, and it is the object of 
everyone of those tales to show the crushing ruin and 
overwhelming bitterness of such an attempt to gain 
earth at the cost of heaven. The story of Midas, who 
wished that all which he touched might turn to gold, 
and was compelled in the agony of starvation to entreat 
a withdrawal of the gift ; the story of Tithonus, who 
asks for immortality, and pines away to nothing and 
utter misery, till he too is relieved of his foolish prayer ; 
the story of Gyges, whose ring, which makes him invisi- 
ble, turns him from an innocent shepherd into a guilty 
king; the story of Faust, and all the lonely anguish 
and haunting dread which rise from the satiety of 
wrong desires — how beauty becomes the curse and ruin 



xvil] THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PRAYER. 161 



f on e — and intellect the delusion and snare of another — 
and power the death and corruption of a third — all these 
have made a commonplace of the vanity and folly of 
chance desires, — all a comment on the deep words of 
the poet, 

" Evertere domos totas optantibus ipsis, 
Di superi." 

Yes, all gifts, save the spontaneous gifts of heaven, are 
like the fairy gold that turns to dust. It is God who 
weaves the little thread of our destinies, and He weaves 
it for our best happiness, unless our rude folly mars His 
plan. The granting of our prayers, even when they are 
not granted as they sometimes are, in anger, is not 
always for our immediate happiness. The priestess of 
Juno asks the goddess to give her choicest blessing to 
her two duteous boys, and next morning she finds them 
lying in the temple with a smile upon their faces, but 
lying in the dreamless sleep of death. All these stories 
are the echoes of the same sad experience — they are the 
pagan forms of the Scripture lessons, " Set your affec- 
tions on things above." And herein too Scripture 
history and secular history agree. Tiberius, lord of 
the world, who exhausted earth to gratify his luxury 
and lust, is known by his own public confession to be 
the miserablest of men. 1 Abderahman the Magnificent, 
prosperous in peace and magnificent in war, dreaded by 
enemies and adored by friends, leaves it upon record 
that in all his life he can count but fourteen happy days. 
Solomon, king of Judah, the beautiful, the successful, 
the renowned, the loved, whose name in all the East is 
a synonym of magic, magnificence, and splendid ease, has 
nothing to say of it all, but that saddest of all weary 
sighs ever breathed by disappointed humanity, " Vanity 
1 Plin., H. N, xxyiii. 5 ; Tac. Ann. iv. 6. 

M. S. M 



162 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of vanities, all is vanity." The very worldliest have 
come to the same confession. One of themselves, even 
a poet of their own, has said, 

" There's not a joy the world can give like those it takes away;" 1 

and another, 

" This world is but a fleeting show, 

For man's illusion given, 
The smiles of joy, the tears of woe 
Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, 

There's nothing true but heaven." 2 

IT. He then whose heart is set — above all if it be 
inordinately and selfishly set — on earthly joys is not 
wise. There is, indeed, nothing wrong in praying for 
such earthly blessings as are simple and innocent ; and 
even if God, in His higher wisdom, does not grant our 
prayer for them, He will grant us sweeter and better 
things instead. " Seek first the kingdom of God, and 
His righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
unto you." God does not grudge to any of His children 
the loftier and nobler elements of earthly happiness, 
Do you think that this glorious offer made Solomon the 
most favoured of mankind ? Do you wish that God 
would do the same for you ? do you think with rapture 
of what you might ask if He gave to your young lives 
the same royal choice ? Are you certain that you could 
never neglect so enormous an opportunity ? My 
brethren, the offer comes to you all ; it has come in part 
already, is coming now, will come hereafter, but most 
decisively now, in these the days of your youth. We 
were not born assuredly for nothing: it was not for 
waste, or for wretchedness, or for annihilation — nay, but 
for happiness, for immortality, for life with Him, that 
God gave us so many grand faculties. It is true that 

1 Byron. 2 Moore. 



xvil] THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PRAYER. 163 

thousands of lives do fail, and are wasted ; but that is 
not of God. It was not for this sad fate that God sent 
us into a world of large air and abounding sunshine ; 
not for this that He encircles our infancy with tenderness, 
and our youth with care ; not for this that Scripture is 
rich with wisdom, and conscience bright with intuition ; 
not for this that Christ died, and the Holy Spirit came. 
If all men do not receive those gifts which are God's*"" 
richest and most priceless blessings, it is not because 
God will not give them, but because men will not ask J 
k for them. St. James, whose blunt, practical directness I 
pointed out to you some Sundays ago, may well exclaim, 
" Ye ask, and have not ; ye have not, because ye ask 
not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss." 
And yet to every one of us God says, "Ask what I 
shall give thee." To every one of us is the promise 
true, " Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name 
He will give it you." Yes, he of you who wills may 
ransack the very treasures of heaven. The insolent 
and the faithless, the wilful and the disobedient, cannot 
enter there ; but it opens with heavenly facility to them 
who will use the golden keys of sincerity and prayer. 

III. Let us then apply these thoughts ; let us see how 
they are true, first of things earthly, then of things 
heavenly. 

1. I say that even of things earthly God says to each 
of you, and most clearly now, " Ask what I shall give 
thee." Do you not see for your own selves the simple 
fact that your lives may be very much what you choose 
to make them ? Do you not see that what makes thel 
chief difference between man and man, boy and boy, is 1 
not so much diversity of powers as force of purpose, ) 
clearness of aim, decision of character ? Every day of 
your life repeats the question, " Ask what I shall give 

m 2 



164 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. Lserm. 

thee. 5 ' Every day comes to you like the Sibyl of old to 
the incredulous king, offering you priceless opportunities 
of wisdom, and, as they are rejected, tossing them into 
the flame, and passing away in sorrow or contempt. 

" Muffled and dumb," 

says a modern poet, 

" The hypocritic days, 
And marching single in an endless file, 
Bring diadems or fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will — 
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and heaven that holds them all. 
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the day 
Turned and departed silent : I too late 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. " 1 

Of course you will see at a glance that asking God 
for these gifts at the hands of time or opportunity does 
not mean mere asking ; that he who asks must, if his 
prayer is to be listened to, be sincere in his petition, 
and if he be sincere, will naturally and necessarily take 
the means which God appoints. (God only helps those 
who help themselves?) Were it not so, if vice could, 
with a wish, yawn into being the rewards of virtue ; if 
sluggishness could, at a touch, appropriate to itself the 
gifts of toil: then prayer would corrupt the world. 
( But God will not listen to a prayer that is not a prayer ;) 
nor will He regard as a prayer the drawling formula 
of the sluggard or the sly falsehood of the hypocrite. 
Action , effort, perseverance: these are the touchstones 
that test the pure gold of sincerity. Pagans saw some- 
thing of the truth. " To the persevering man," says the 
Persian poet, "the blessed immortals are swift;" and 
one of the most vigorous of the Eoman emperors died 

i Emerson. 



xvii.] THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PRAYER. 165 

with the grand word " laboremus " on his lips. And 
labour may do much ; but if we add the oremus to the 
IdboremuSy then the two are simply irresistible. The 
race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but 
to the diligent and to the prayerful. As for vulgarer 
and purely earthly ends, any one who chooses to obtain 
them can obtain them. If any of you cared to make 
to-day so poor a vow, as that you would die rich, there 
is no doubt that you could die rich. If any of you 
willed to-day to force your path to power and distinction, 
there is no doubt that y<5u could so force on to power and 
distinction. (Nature will give you nothing for nothing^} 
She offers you her gifts clenched tight in a granite hand, 
and before you can have them you must force that hand 
open by sheer labour. Say what you will have, pay the 
price, and she will give it you ; she will give it you, 
although she warns you beforehand, that if rank, and 
wealth, and fame, and ease, are what you long for, these, 
without God's blessing, are apples of Sodom filled with 
bitter dust. But take a better case — the case of many 
of you. You are here at school ; certain studies are set 
before you, certain opportunities given you, certain 
rewards offered. Your interest and your duty coincide 
in urging you to use these advantages, to work, to do 
your best. Your interest, — because every term wasted 
now may mean a year of sorrow and anxiety ; and every 
year wasted now may mean ten years of disappointment 
and hope deferred hereafter; and a school life wasted 
now may mean a man's life of useless mediocrity and 
repining struggle. And your duty, — because in this are 
involved the intense wish of your parents, the gratitude 
you owe to friends, the earnest hopes of your masters, 
the honour of a school you ought to love, the distinct 
indications of the voice of God. Now, if neither interest 



166 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

nor duty move you, you must be of poor natures. None 
but bad influences are on the other side. Idleness 
pleading the charms of sloth; conceit inflating with a 
silly self-satisfaction ; despair saying " I cannot ; " pride 
saying " I will not." It is the lotos-fruit, and the 
charmed cup, and the siren song, set in competition with 
the voices of heaven ; and you may think the lotos- 
fruit delightful, but it means exile; and the charmed 
cup sweet, but it means degradation; and the siren 
song enchanting, but it means death and shipwreck on 
the desolate and loathly shore. Oh yes, this is all more 
or less possible, and the outcome of it is a life wasted 
for want of humility or want of purpose. But I say — \ 
for I have often and often witnessed it, and prophesied 
it, and been true in my prophecy — that any boy who 
steadfastly resists those evil influences, any boy who 
works and denies himself, and prays to God to bless / 
and help him, may win if he will. Whole-heartedness, 
manly determination, noble resolve, above all, the 
humility which always * accompanies true worth, — I 
would rather possess these a thousand times, and I 
should feel certain that, even for worldly success, they 
are infinitely more valuable than the mere flash in the 
pan of a conceited cleverness. The " modesty of fearful 
duty " is more blessed of God, and more beloved of man, 
and more valued even by the world, than the raw 
presumption of a shallow quickness, and the crude 
self-confidence of an ignorance which takes itself for 
knowledge. I say that these things will succeed ; but 
even if they do not — and of success we all think far too 
much — they at least involve that holy self-control, that 
contentedness of heart, that capacity of service, which 
are more golden than earthly gold, and are the success 
of heaven itself. So that to the youngest and most 



xvn.] THE OMNIPOTENCE OF PEA YER. 167 

self-distrustful boy here I say, My child, doubt not, only 
believe ; cast your bread on the waters, you will find it 
after many days. God says, "Ask what I shall give 
thee." Ask in faith, nothing doubting, and do your 
duty while you ask, and then not only have you no 
need to envy the gifts of any living man, but the very 
angels up in heaven — even those nearest to the throne, 
lucentes et ardentes, the shining spirits of knowledge, 
the burning spirits of love — might, with no sigh, 
exchange their lot with yours. 

2. And though I believe, nay, though I know, this 
to be true of earthly things, it is ten times more indis- 
putably true of the better and the heavenly. Oh, covet 
earnestly the best gifts, and you shall have them. Here 
God says to you with yet more earnest insistency, "Ask 
what I shall give thee." Dost thou love uprightness ? 
Ask it, will it, and thou shalt be upright. Dost thou 
love purity ? Ask it, will it, and thou shalt be pure. 
Dost thou feel the high ideal of moral nobleness ? Ask 
for it, will it, and thou shalt be noble. Were an angel 
to glide down upon the sunbeams, and offer you any- 
thing which you sincerely desired, would you not think 
it at once ungrateful and senseless to refuse ? Is it less 
senseless to refuse when God offers you an immortality 
of blessedness, and garlands that cannot fade ? Perhaps 
you have lost the wish for such blessings, as the 
drunkard, loving only that which is destroying him, 
loathes the pure water of the springs. Well, God can 
restore you the moral and the spiritual taste yet unde- 
praved. Let the u sorrow rise from beneath/' and the 
u consolation will meet it from above." He offers it you 
again to-day. Pointing to the fair fruits of the Spirit 
which grow upon the Tree of Life ; pointing to the river 
of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing out of the 



168 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xvti. 

throne of God and of the Lamb ; pointing to the heaven 
of radiant peace which shines in every cleansed and 
forgiven heart ; pointing to the peace which passeth all 
understanding, and which man can neither give nor take 
away, He has said to you often from your childhood, 
He says to you once more in this sacred place to-day, 
" Ask what I shall give thee" He said it to Solomon 
in tfce dim visions of the night, He says it to us by the 
vftice of His Eternal Son. " Ask, and it shall be given 
you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be 
opened unto you : for every one that asketh receiveth ; 
and he that seeketh findeth ; and to him that knocketh 
it shall be opened." > 



June 15th, 1373. 



/ 







SEEMON XVIII. 

SOWING AMONG THOBNS. 

Jer. iv. 3. 

" Thus saith the Lord, Break up your fallow ground, and sow not 
among thorns." 

Last Sunday I spoke to you of the first part of this 
text, and tried to urge upon you as its message that 
you should, with all your hearts and all your souls set 
yourselves to the fresh duties which now, at the begin- 
ning of another term, devolve upon you here. The 
second half of the text seems appropriate for to-day; it 
dwells, not on the need for labour; but on a danger 
which, if neglected, would render that toil unfruitful. 
It warns you that it is not enough to break up your 
fallow ground, nor even to sow good seed ; but that the 
ground must be a clean fallow — that it must be free 
from pre-occupations — that there must be room for the 
good seed to grow. 

The metaphor must be clear to the youngest boy. 
The field is the human heart ; the seed is the word and 
the will of God; the harvest is your sanctification. 
When the heart is simple, and innocent, and free from 
wrong, there are no thorns there ; it is as Paradise before 
Adam fell ; nothing grows in that heavenly garden but 
the golden fruits*of the Spirit and the fair flowers of 
grace. But when man fell, the ground was cursed; 



170 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

thorns and thistles grew in it ; only by the sweat of 
his brow could man wring from it the bread of life. 
Even so it is with all of us. When, in growing years, 
we pass forth out of the Paradise of our early innocence, 
the soil of the heart is more or less encumbered ; the 
seeds and roots of evil things are in it; those evil 
things must be cleared away, must, at the worst, be 
utterly kept down, or the good seed will produce nothing 
but barren and blighted ears. 

You will all remember the Parable of the Sower. 
There some of the seed falls upon ground so bare that 
it will not grow at all, and the fowls of the air carry it 
away; just as there are some natures so callous, so past 
feeling as to seem incapable of even a good impression. 
And other seed fell on stony grounds, on natures so 
thin, so shallow, so poverty-stricken, that the seed 
appears only to wither, scorched by the first sun, because 
it has no strengthening root. And other seed fell among 
thorns. Not, observe, on full-grown thorns — no sower 
would be so senseless as to sow seed there — but on thorn- 
roots lying under the surface, hidden, unnoticed, of 
which we are afterwards told that they sprang up. Yes, 
the soil looked good enough, but roots of bitterness were 
in it, and under it. The fallow had been broken up, 
ploughed it had been and harrowed, but not deeply, 
not resolutely, not faithfully enough ; and so when the 
sunbeams fell on it, and it was watered from above with 
the gracious dews of God, the seed grew indeed, but 
the thorns grew also, and stronger and more rapidly, 
and the more they grew the more they robbed the 
good seed of heat, and light, and moisture, and so 
absorbed into their own evil nature the whole strength 
and energy of the soil, that the green blade could never 
become the ripened ear, and at last, as you looked upon 



xviii.] SOWING AMONG THORNS. 171 

the field, you could hardly tell that there had been corn 
in it at all ; 

" Things rank and gross in nature 
Possessed it merely." 

Now I think that in this part of the Parable, and in 
our text, there is a special lesson, because the facts of 
which it warns us are specially common. Hard and 
trodden soils — dull and heavy as the fool's heart — there 
are; thin and shallow soils, on which only hunger- 
bitten and blighted harvests grow, there are ; and, thank 
God, there are also soils rich, and good, and deep, which 
bring forth fruit to perfection ; but commoner perhaps 
than any of these are those soils in which the tares and 
wheat grow side by side, and the crisis of time and of 
eternity depends on this, — whether we suffer the tares or 
the wheat to prevail. Do not many of you feel it to be 
so ? Do you not, as I speak, recognise within you this 
duality of nature ? Do you not at some times feel 
yourselves capable of sinking to almost any depth of 
folly and of degradation, while at other times the grace 
of God seems to be stirring sensibly within your heart, 
and everything sweetest, and noblest, and even saintliest 
seems naturally within your reach ? Have you never 
felt with St. Paul, " the good which I would, I do not ; 
the evil which I would not, that I do " ? Yes, I am 
well assured that you all feel that there is an Adam, 
and there is a Christ within you all, that " the angel has 
you by the hand and the serpent by the heart," and 
that you, like the great King who heard the preacher 
dwell on the new man and the old man within us, feel 
ready to exchaim, " I recognise those two men/' No^ 
the thorns of the parable, and of the prophet's meta- 
phor, are that evil nature, these evil impulses; the 



172 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



wrong which struggles within you, and which, if not 
suppressed, if not to the utmost of your power eradicated 
will render it impossible for the good to grow. This is 
one of the sternest, strongest, plainest lessons of life. 
There are in every man, said the Jewish rabbis, two 
impulses, the good and the evil impulse, 1 and he who 
offers to God his evil impulse offers the best of all 
sacrifices. Yes, this self-sacrifice is one of the most 
excellent as well as one of the necessary lessons. He 
who has not understood the lesson which all nature tells 
him, " you must abstain/' " you must give up," — or, as 
our Lord expressed it, "you must sell all that you have," 
" you must deny yourself/' " you must take up the 
cross/'— has as yet learnt nothing of life's meaning. He 
has not yet learnt what every good man must learn, 
that life is a battle, a struggle, the cultivation of a 
stubborn soil, a service in an enemy's country in time 
of war, where carelessness is danger, and sleep is death. 
I hope then that you will understand something of 
what is meant by this warning, " And sow not among 
thorns." To sow among thorns will be to render the 
harvest of your lives impossible ; to make the soil of 
your hearts a wasted spot in God's garden ; unfruitful, 
rank with poisonous berries and pernicious weeds ; " the 
miry places thereof, and the marishes thereof shall not 
be healed, they shall be given to salt." If then you are 
in earnest, beware that there be not — hidden deep 
under the soil of your heart — any sins and tendencies, 
any desires or passions, any vanities or lusts, which you 
have not as it were stubbed up, b.ut which remain as a 
source of special danger ; looking diligently lest any of 
you fail of the grace of God ; lest any root of bitterness 
springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled. 
1 Jezer tdbh and Jezer ha-ra. 



xviii.] SOWING AMONG THORNS. 173 

And to fix this "warning more deeply in your 
hearts, let me ask you whether even the experience 
of this week since your return may not have put for 
you a real emphasis into the words, " Sow not among 
thorns i" All of you I am sure returned here with the 
simple and sincere purpose, or at the lowest, wish, to 
be better and to do better than before. Has that 
resolution been for any of you as the morning cloud, 
and as the early dew? Have you found yourself 
slipping insensibly, and unchanged, with fatal facility, 
into the old faults, the old errors, the old sins ? Perhaps 
last; term you had been an idle boy ; you had made no 
real progress ; you had wasted the term in games, in 
frivolities, in amusements ; you had not made it a help 
for you in the future ; you had only grieved your 
parents in it and disgusted yourself: it was a year 
that the locust had eaten. Well, you came back 
prepared for one more effort: you would do better; 
you would avail yourself of this fresh chance; you 
would turn over a new leaf ; you would not be deaf to 
what, on this matter, conscience said. But as the old 
temptations begin to surround you, the old amusements 
to turn you aside, the old indolence to creep over you 
the old claims of gossip, procrastination, half-heartedness, 
self-indulgence, to make themselves heard, have you not 
already begun to succumb ? Alas ! he who has once 
fed on the lotos-fruit of indolence too easily craves for 
it again ! Or perhaps your temptation was quite 
different; — it was to irritability of language, violence 
of temper, headstrong want of consideration for ochers, 
a tendency to unjust hatreds and bitter words. And 
you had meant when you came back this time to keep 
a watch over the door of your lips, and some control 
over the passion of your heart. Yet when something 



174 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

you did not like was said or done, have you not yielded 
perhaps already to the old fault ? Alas, " lucema recens 
extincta, levi fiatu accenditur ; " when a candle is but 
just extinguished, how does a mere breath make it flame 
again ! Or, once more, your temptation — and it would 
be a foolish and fatal hypocrisy to assume the absence of 
such temptations — had been to desecrate the temple of 
your soul by dwelling on forbidden images and impure 
desires ; but, knowing the stain and the shame and the 
curse of this, you meant now to be more watchful, 
more temperate, more prayerful, that yours, by the aid 
of God's Holy Spirit, might be the c]ean heart and the 
right spirit within you ; but there came some wicked 
suggestion, some neglected prayer, and out of your 
heart have proceeded evil thoughts. Alas ! he who 
has lifted to his lips the poisoned chalice finds it hard 
to resist its brutalising power. And so it may be that 
many of you have even already experienced the truth, 
which must come to the unbeliever with despairing 
force, but which should only stimulate the Christian to 
more hopeful effort, that, save for God's special grace 
on your own efforts, your destiny has been already 
decided by yourselves ; you have increased your own 
perils, diminished your own force. If this has been so 
with you, — if in any way, in spite of resolutions which 
were all too feeble, you have realised already your own 
infirmity, — and if, recognising it, you have sought to find 
its cause, then you will know why the prophet says 
to you, " Break up your fallow ground, and sow not 
among thorns." He says it because no harvests can grow 
on the half-cleared soil. What must you do to those 
hidden thorn-roots ? Y"ou must do what the husbandman 
does. Have you never seen how he deals with some 
hard, stubborn fibrous root which he finds in the 



xviil] SOWING AMONG THORNS. 175 

ground ? He dashes it to pieces with his pickaxe, he 
stubbs it up with the spade and hoe ; he tears it out 
with main force ; he burns the vicious weed out of the 
soil with fire. You must do the same ; you must 
— Christ Himself has said it — give up ; cut off, — rather 
than perish, rather than yield yourself the willing slave 
of sin, — you must cut off the right hand, pluck out 
the right eye. 

As the outcome, then, of all that I have said, I 
would urge upon you two thoughts, which, stated in 
simplest and plainest language, may be good for you 
to take to heart. 

I. First, then, make your choice now, and for ever. In 
the field of your life, which shall grow, wheat or tares ? 
that is, shall it be death or life ? shall it be good or evil ? 
shall it be light or darkness? shall it be shame or 
peace? shall your life be pure or debased, useful or 
pernicious, selfish or devoted ? Some men have died, 
and have left the world better for them ; their goodness 
has fertilised the ages as with a refreshing stream, and, 
" having planted many a rose of Sharon, and made their 
little portion of the desert smile, they departed in the 
faith that the green margin would spread as the seasons 
of God eame round, till earth ended with Eden as it 
began ; " and other men have died, whose memory and 
whose wickedness have been as a taint in the pure air, 
and a poison in the crystal stream. To which class 
will you belong ? The decision of that question will 
probably depend in large measure on these schoolboy 
years. Oh, make your choice now and for ever ! Make 
your choice ? Nay, it is made for you, — by every fact 
in your life from the cradle until now, — by your birth 
in a Christian land, by your education in a Christian 
school, by your baptismal admission into the Christian 



176 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [skrm. 

Church, — you have been signed, and sealed, and chosen 
for God, you have seen His face, and His name is on 
your foreheads. For this He made you ; for this His 
Son died for you ; for this the Spirit pleads with you. 
I cannot say to you, How long halt ye between two 
opinions ? If the Lord be God, follow Him, but if 
Baal, then follow him. For God is your God, and 
every hymn you sing in His praise, and every morn 
and eve you meet in this chapel, and every Sunday that 
you worship, and every Holy Communion of which 
you partake, and every time you kneel " by the altar of 
your own bedsides," you acknowledge your allegiance to 
Him, you say, or profess to say, " Oh God, Thou art my 
God, early will I seek Thee." But the choice must not 
only, my brethren, be made for you, but made by you ; 
it must be a choice made not only with your lips, but in 
your lives, it must be a choice more earnest, more 
conscious, more determinate. Tour life must be a life 
in earnest ; a life not from hand to mouth ; a life not 
of easy yesterdays and qonfident to-morrows ; but as a 
pilgrim's journey — as a soldier's battle — a toil as of the 
faithful husbandmen from summer to summer and 
from dawn to night. Oh that ere you leave this 
chapel there might be on some of your minds at least 
an inflashing of this truth, and. that when you kneel 
down, as you all will do, you would offer up yourselves, 
your souls, and bodies to your Heavenly Father, and 
say, " God, my heart is ready, my heart is ready ; by 
the blood of Christ, oh cleanse it; by His Spirit 
strengthen it; for His sake, oh accept it, make it 
Thine." 

II. And the second lesson is, Let the choice be 
absolute. No lukewarmness — neither cold nor hot ; no 
backward glance at the guilty city. No tampering 



xvni.] SOWING AMONG THORNS. 177 

with the accursed thing ; no truce with Canaan ; no 
weak attempt to serve two masters ; no wretched and 
w r avering wish to grow both tares and wheat. Oh do 
not, my brethren, fall into that fatal and desperate error 
which maims the usefulness and mars the peace of so 
many lives, — the error of supposing that you can keep 
your sin and your Saviour, — that there can be any 
compromise in your heart between good and evil, — that 
good and evil may dwell in that heart side by side 
without being forced to wrestle in deadly antagonism 
till one has the undisputed sway, — that you can be a 
child of God, and yet, each time the temptation comes 
upon you, can reject His mercy and break His law. 
rt When any one says I will sin and repent afterwards," 
says an ancient Jewish book, " and does this a second 
time, and again does the same, no more strength for 
repentance is granted him." For this is willing sin ; it 
is to sell yourself to work wickedly. Therefore, as 
Israel was bidden to exterminate the guilty Canaanites, 
or they would be corrupted by them, so you must 
destroy the sins you best love, or they will destroy you. 
Take then the Cross ; as our fathers smote with sw r ord 
and battle-axe to free Palestine from Paynim feet, so do 
you be brave and dauntless in the great crusade for the 
Holy Land of your soul. Pight, and fight hard ; strike, 
and strike home for God. 

My brethren, believe me, in conclusion, that there is 
nothing doubtful about what I have said. It is certain. 
It is the truth of God. You must not sow among 
thorns ; and to dig out the thorns is not easy. But one 
word, let me add, lest any of you be discouraged. If 
you fall into a sin of weakness, repent indeed, and 
humble yourself before God, but do not despair ; say 
indeed it is mine own infirmity, but remember the years 

M.S. N 



178 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm.xviii. 

of the right hand of the Most Highest. A good man 
may sin, and when he sins God will not spare him ; but 
— when he falls, — then from the earth which his knees 
have touched in prayer, he rises, Antaeus-like, with 
tenfold strength, and says with a voice whose resolution 
no sobs can choke, " Eejoice not over me, Satan, mine 
enemy, for when I fall I shall rise again." It is said 
of the best riders that they know how to fall. Do not 
think it beneath the dignity, I had almost said the 
awfulness of my subject, if for the encouragement of 
those who are helpless because they fail so often in the 
effort to do right, I draw an illustration from common 
life. I would say then to every Christian boy, as was said 
by one of the most famous of modern hunters, you must 
expect a fall sometimes, but with a fall you may get 
over anything. He himself had been thrown no less 
than seventy times in his life, but the end was that 
he could ride anywhere. He rode at the most' tre- 
mendous leaps, and never even cast a glance back at 
them. And what was his secret — " Fling your heart 
over," he used to say, " and your horse will follow." 
I take the everyday illustration, and I say to yon, In 
spite of hindrances in the present, in spite of difficul- 
ties in the future, in spite of obstacles from the past, 
press forward in God's service, press forward in your 
Saviour's strength, fling your heart over, and nothing 
shall stop you in your heavenward course. 

September 2Sth, 1873, 






SERMON XIX. 

HOW TO KEEP GOOD RESOLUTIONS. 

2 Kings x. 15. 
* Is thine heart right ? " 

The words, my brethren, are a fragment: I have 
dissevered them from their context ; I have made them 
subserve to a meaning not quite identical with that in 
which they were spoken. But still they formulate a 
solemn question, well suited for this day. Imagine 
that the guardian angel of your life and destiny — nay, 
imagine that the God and Father who created you, the 
Saviour who died for you, the Holy Spirit who dwelleth 
in the temple of all undesecrated hearts — is asking you 
here and now this short question : " Is thine heart 
right ? " and let your consciences answer ■ in the silence, 
and answer clear and true. 

The answer of him to whom the question was addressed 
was, " It is." — " If it be, give me thine hand. And he 
gave him his hand ; and he took him up to him into the 
chariot. And he said, Come with me, and see my 
zeal for the Lord." Let the rude fragment of a cruel 
history serve in some sort as a symbol or allegory of 
nobler things. Whatever were the sins and errors of 
these, who thus drove forth to trample upon idolatry 

N 2 



180 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

and deal retribution upon crime, let us at least be like 
them in this, that, with united efforts, with earnest zeal, 
with unswerving purpose, we set forth once more to-day 
to fight, in our own heart? and in the world around us, 
the battle of the Lord of Hosts. Whether we can do 
this — whether we are on the Lord's side at all, or in the 
ranks, secret or open, of His enemies — depends on the 
truth with which we can answer this question: "Is 
thine heart right ? " 

And I do not doubt that most of you would answer 
with Jehonadab the son of Eechab, "It is." Sitting 
here in God's holy place, now on the first Sunday of a 
new, and what may be, I trust, please God, a happy 
term — now so shortly after the confirmation of many of 
you, now before the Holy Communion of the supper of 
the Lord — you would scarcely hesitate, any one of you, 
to answer — in different tones, indeed, and with very 
different degrees of earnestness and sincerity, but still 
to answer — " Yes, my heart is right ; my mind is set 
upon righteousness ; I do think, or wish to think, the 
thing that is right/' 

Yes, my brethren, but what I want to make you 
see and feel this morning is, that there is all the 
difference in the world between the different ways in 
which this answer is spoken ; and that there is only 
one way, only one meaning, in which it can be indeed 
spoken honestly, as before God, from the ground of the 
heart. 

1. There is, for instance, the careless, indifferent, 
frivolous answer ; the answer of those who have hitherto 
resisted the grace of God, and who, finding that they 
can sin as yet with but little sorrow, neither know nor 
really care what religion means. It is the answer of 
the gay young prodigal ere the famine has come, and 



xix.] HOW TO KEEP GOOD RESOLUTIONS. 181 

while in the genial flush of youth and pleasure he sits 
at the lighted banquet, and does not dream that there 
lurks in the winecup a deadly poison, and that those 
bad friends, with their false caresses and the lie upon 
their smiling faces, are but a wretched company of the 
living dead. Untrained as yet in the meaning and 
discipline of life ; ignorant as yet of what may be its 
fatal import ; not believing as yet that the sunshine of 
youth is but a transient gleam, and that the blue heaven 
from which it falls is the heaven of eternity ; such as 
these would give the answer very carelessly. " Is my 
heart right? Yes, I suppose so. I have still some 
fragments of memory about things which I learnt when 
I was yet a child, and these serve me as a sort of 
religion. I have not quite forgotten what my mother 
taught me when once, more innocent than now, I lifted 
my little hands in prayer. I do not love evil for its 
own sake. There are some wrong things that I would 
not do. I am not worse than he, or he, or he. 
If I am not particularly good, neither am I entirely 
bad," and so on, and so on. One knows too well the 
hollow ring of words like these. Ah, my brethren, do 
you think that this is enough ? that this answer will 
do ? Alas ! such an answer means nothing, or worse 
than nothing. Do not deceive yourself with the notion 
that it implies the faintest effort. To Him indeed who 
readeth your heart, to Him before whose eye all your 
real thoughts lie naked and open, it has a meaning, but 
it is an evil one. In your yes He reads no. In your 
" My heart is right," He reads that it is " deceitful 
above all things, and desperately wicked." To Him 
your answer means nothing more nor less than this : "I 
will continue in sin," " There is no God," or " Tush ! 
if there be, He is far away, and careth not for it." And 



182 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

if this be indeed the real meaning of any answer, then 
if the word " beware " were in the thunder's mouth it 
could not speak too loudly : for this is the beginning of 
the fatal history of every lost and ruined soul, it is the 
slope of the smooth bright river, as in broad, unbroken 
sheet it rushes in silence to the cataract. " Every man 
is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and 
enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth 
forth sin : and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth 
death." 

II. 1. Let us take another answer, not like the last, 
wholly hollow and insincere, but too impulsive, too 
confident. "Is thine heart right?" "Yes," another 
will say, " I do sincerely dislike what is bad, and I do 
rather despise myself for the weakness with which I have 
yielded to it. And I mean to be quite different now. 
Last term I had such and such a companion, such and 
such an excuse, such and such a hindrance ; I began badly, 
and could not break off from a false start : but this is 
a new term, I will do better ; I will be less idle, or less 
passionate, or less self-indulgent," or less whatever his 
special fault has been. You will ? his guardian angel 
might say to such a one ; but for how long ? and in 
whose strength ? In your own strength, and only until 
the next temptation comes ? You will ? and do you know 
what this answer involves ? Do you know that it means 
not merely a weak wish, but a strong desire ; not only 
a strong desire, but a resolute effort ; not only even a 
resolute effort, but an intense and absorbing purpose. 
It means the girded loin, and the burning lamp, and 
the race continued though the feet totter and the breath 
sobs. Alas, it is so easy to be good when there is no 
temptatior near. The man or the boy, for instance, who, 
with thankful heart and weakened frame, rises from the 



xix.] HOW TO KEEP GOOD RESOLUTIONS. 183 

bed of long and dangerous sickness — who, perhaps, in 
the lonely hours of imminent death has thought with 
shame and sorrow over his sinful life — that man or boy 
thinks it cannot be but that henceforth he shall be a 
changed character ; but is he so always ? When the 
voice of the siren is loud again, when the full tide of 
blood runs in the healthy veins, have you never known 
cases in which he has only risen from the bed, well-nigh 
of death, to be an open backslider, worse even than 
before ? My brethren, a weak resolve, a half resolve, 
a mere verbal resolve, a resolve made in your own 
strength, of what value is it ? Have you never heard, 
or have you never understood, the deep-sighted proverb, 
that " Hell is paved with good intentions " % Let me 
take no very bad and grievous case, no case of shameful 
degradation or deadly sin, but a common every-day case 
of a life not strong in duty — a life that not a few, 
perhaps, among you may recognise as your own especial 
danger — a danger to be overcome. Such a boy at the 
beginning of this new term has formed, or thinks he 
has formed, a sort of half-resolution to improve, and not 
to waste yet another of his few precious years of happy 
life and golden opportunity. He begins well for the 
first few days ; he springs up cheerfully and manfully 
in the morning in good time, with no lazy self-indulgent 
lingering ; he says his prayers humbly and reverently ; 
he kneels punctually in chapel; his lesson has been 
honestly prepared ; he succeeds, and thinks that he is 
entering on a better state of things, and that this term 
at last is going to be a well-spent, and faithful, and 
honourable one. It goes on for a few days. But it 
hardly needs even a temptation to make him fall away ; 
if a temptation does come, however trivial, his good 
purpose slips into instant ashes, like tow at the very 



184 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [sewm. 

breath of lire. But even if no special temptation comes, 
there is no perseverance, no solidity, no manly con- 
sistence in his brief improvement. One morning all is 
done a little later ; the rising begins to get hurried and 
slovenly; the morning prayer first slurred over, then 
shortened, then neglected ; unprepared, he meets the 
temptations of the day ; the work is put off or done 
anyhow ; the playtime unduly lengthened ; the novel 
not laid aside; the duty forgotten or neglected. He 
sinks lower and lower, the esteem of his teachers is lost, 
his self-respect is wholly weakened, and so, little by little, 
ever little by little, the old story is renewed again, and 
the new term is wasted like the old ; and, like the 
waves of a silent river, irrevocable time flows on, and 
the careless boy enters the hard struggle of life an 
irresolute, ignorant, half-armed man. Yes, little by 
little, irrevocable time flows on ; the twenty-four hours 
of the day seem a long time, and yet it is the second 
hand that does it ; it is all traversed, as has well been 
said, by tiniest tickings of the clock. And life is but a 
day like this, and the days are its seconds, and the 
terms its hours ; and the morning of its boyhood, and 
its manhood's noon, soon merge, merge insensibly, into 
the chill grey evening and darkened close. 

" To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to-day 
To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dnsty death." 

2. I have purposely chosen a minor instance ; but how 
is it when things are worse ? where the temptation is 
more serious ? the fall more heinous ? How is it when 
Satan, having for a time cunningly forborne to startle 
his victim with any great sin, with any glaring or violent 



xix.] HOW TO KEEP GOOD RESOLUTIONS. 185 

temptations, suddenly confronts his biased will and his 
nerveless heart, and pushes him with all the dead weight 
of reiterated weaknesses into some sin of a moment 
which is the curse and anguish of a life ? Has there 
not been a fearful answer then to the question "Is 
thine heart right ? " and has not that answer been quite 
other than that which some of you may quite honestly 
think that you are giving now ? And are such warnings 
vain ? Would not the experience of past terms empha- 
sise them to some of you ? Have you not on the first 
Sundays of other terms meant well, and yet not done well, 
and the idle been idle, and the weak weak, and the unjust 
unjust, and the filthy filthy still ? And of the hundreds 
and hundreds who have sat before you on those same 
benches, have none gone through the same life history ? 
have none left the school after a career ungrateful, dis- 
creditable, wasted, having only pained the hearts of 
those who loved them ? And have not others sat on 
those benches as new boys, hopeful perhaps and happy, 
who yet grow up to be false, and treacherous, and to set 
shameful examples, and to do the devil's work, and to 
carry with them through life the extreme malediction 
which lights and shall light upon those who, in their 
selfish depravity, have wilfully led others into sin? 
Few, thank God, very, very few ; but still some ; and 
let those some be to some — yea, to all of you and of us 
— a warning deeper than death. I have seen the tears 
of mothers over their dead sons' grave ; but the anguish 
of bereavement melts soon into the golden light of a 
Mth full of immortality ; and all of you who have the 
spell of home affection in your hearts, remember this — 
that less salt and less bitter are the tears which wet a 
mother's cheek, and less envenomed is the agony which 
lacerates a father's heart, over a dying child than ovei 



186 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



a child that causeth shame; and many and many of 
your parents would echo with all their souls the 
saying of Queen Blanche, the mother of St. Louis of 
France, that she would rather see her son a corpse at 
her feet than know that he had committed a deadly 
sin. 

III. " Is thine heart right ? " Let us take one more 
answer: some may answer carelessly; some presump- 
tuously; but will not many of you — yes, I am very 
sure you will — answer in a deeper, humbler, sincerer, 
more serious spirit ? " Yes/' you will say, " I am weak, 
I know, and sinful; and bitter experience has taught 
me that my own good resolutions are as the morning 
cloud and as the early dew. They have been so 
because at former times I have not watched enough 
or prayed enough, or listened enough to the voice of 
conscience, and of God's Holy Spirit within my soul. 
But I am sorry — though my life has not been always 
right, yet I hope, I trust, that my heart is right — it is 
not hard. I do hate the thing that is evil ; I am not 
blinded by self-conceit and sin. And God, I know has 
not forsaken me. Here, like a green leaf fresh-plucked 
from the Tree of Life, He gives me now a new term, a 
new hope, a new chance ; and even now will I offer to 
Him a silent prayer, and will cry to Him, Oh, my God, 
my Father, lead back to Thyself thy sinful and wander- 
ing child. Here is my wilful, sinful heart; make it 
humble, and strong, and faithful unto Thee. Here is 
my poor stained and feeble life ; take it, and make it 
pure and noble. My own strength, Lord, is perfect 
weakness ; my own wisdom is utter folly ; my own 
righteousness is utter sin : but I lift up mine eyes 
unto the hills whence cometh my help, "Make me 
to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my 



xix.] HOW TO KEEP GOOD RESOLUTIONS. 187 

God. Let Thy loving Spirit lead me into the land of 
righteousness." 

This, my brethren, this is the tone and spirit of the 
answer, which, would to God we all might make * 
because, if any resolve in this spirit, God will help him. 
He will lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen 
the feeble knees. Fear not thou who canst answer 
thus. The ocean of life is large, and thy little boat is 
small, and there has been many and many a terrible and 
disastrous shipwreck on those rough waves ; but though 
the great winds blow and the angry billows roll, God 
shall keep fast thy feeble hand upon the guiding helm, 
and thou shalt reach the safe haven where thou wouldst 
be, and out of the gossamer threads of thy weak and 
wavering will, He will forge the iron cables which shall 
moor thee safe to that everlasting Hope, which is an 
anchor of the soul. 

With such thoughts, with such prayers, with such 
purposes, with the determination more and more ear- 
nestly to make our hearts right before God — humble, 
earnest, watchful — let us kneel at the Holy Table of the 
Lord. Nowhere can we better consecrate our hearts than 
there. Oh, let every one of us kneel there, meaning 
indeed to consecrate ourselves, — our souls and bodies, 
this term and all the rest of our lives — to Him who 
created and Him who died for us. Let it be to us an 
Eucharist, a feast of deep thankfulness to God for His 
many mercies to us and to our school ; let it be to us a 
Communion, to bind us all more and more closely to- 
gether in the bonds of Christian fellowship, eager to 
stand by one another, to wish each other prosperity, 
to do each other good; above all may it be to us a 
memorial of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. If we 
follow the footsteps of His blessed life, they may lead 



188 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm xix. 

us indeed, at times into sad and lonely places, and there 
may be times when we, like many of earth's noblest, 
may have to tread them with bleeding feet. But what 
matters it ? If we w r alk in those footsteps, we shall see 
God's face, and His name shall be in our foreheads, and 
they shall lead us at last to the realms of everlasting 

joy- 

May 10th, 1874. 



SEKMOX XX. 

THE OBJECTS OF SCHOOL LIFE. 

1 Kings xix. 13. 
'* There came a voice unto him and said, What doest thou here ? " 

I isolate these words from their splendid context, upon 
which I am not going to touch. To-day the Voice 
comes, not to Elijah in the wilderness, but to us in this 
chapel ; and, in answer to its appeal, we must try to 
understand our position, here and now, in all its definite- 
ness. We lose by not reminding ourselves of our special 
duties ; we lose by not going up into the tribunal of our 
own consciences, and setting ourselves before ourselves; 1 
we lose by laying to our souls the flattering unction of 
general professions, and not rigidly bringing them to 
bear on daily acts. We should do our work, I think 
better, I am sure we should deceive ourselves less — if 
we asked ourselves, " Am I, day by day, doing my day's 
task in the little corner of the vineyard which God has 
given me to cultivate ? and am I doing it, not perfunc- 
torily, but faithfully, not discontentedly, but humbly, not 
with eyeservice, but in singleness of heart ? " If we can 
put those questions to ourselves very searchingly, and 
still answer them with a clear conscience, it is enough. 
Sloth, discontent, disobedience, disloyalty to duty, — 

1 St. Augustine. 



100 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. . [serm. 

these torture and scourge the souls of those who yield 
to them ; but, whether others count a man fortunate or 
unfortunate, and whether the elements of earthly happi- 
ness be largely or but very sparingly within his reach, yet 
the world, — were it " one entire and perfect chrysolite " 
— were all too little to give in exchange for that deep 
peace which God sheds into the inmost soul of that man 
who has simplified every other end and hope in life to 
this : — to do God's will from the ground of the heart, — 
to show that we love the Father whom we have not seen, 
by loving, by serving, by helping in the holy life, our 
brother whom we have seen. 

I. To-day, then, if we will hear God's voice asking us 
" What doest thou here ? " let us not harden our hearts. 
What, for instance, does the Lord require of us who are 
set over you ? To feed the flock of God which is among 
us ; to bear every labour, to make every sacrifice ; to be 
instant in season and out of season ; to reprove, rebuke, 
exhort ; to remind ourselves often how deep and wide 
are the interests entrusted to us, how strict and solemn 
is the account which we must one day give before the 
judgment seat of Christ : — are not these our duties ? It 
may be that, like all duties in any sphere of life, they 
may be often irksome and discouraging ; it may be that 
we may see the tares springing up in rank growth among 
the good seed which we have sown ; it may be that 
childish frivolity, that subtle impurity, that want of 
dignity, and want of loyalty, and , want of gratitude, 
may often make us sad at heart : but results are not in 
our hands, efforts are ; and what God requires of all of 
us is effort, not result ; and the very best efforts of the 
very greatest and holiest men have often been exactly 
those which, from the Cross of Christ downwards, have 
often seemed to fail the most ; so that all we have to do 



xx.] TEE OBJECTS OF SCHOOL LIFE. 191 

is to work on always, undiscouraged, in the unalterable 
conviction that, in the course of duty, failure can never 
he more than apparent, and that to the end of time, 
because God is God, evil things shall perish, but " good 
deeds cannot die." 1 

II. But if these are our duties, what are yours ? 

(a) In the first and most everyday sense, you are here 
to be taught, to learn, i.e., to store and to enlighten your 
minds, and to be saved from that low and dangerous 
ignorance which is at once a misery and a disgrace. 
What you are taught is not altogether a matter of choice, 
either for us or for you. In all its main outlines, at any 
rate, it is dictated to us by the wisdom of past experience 
in many ages, and by the exigencies of that which is 
immediately needful for you in this. Yet it is only the 
very shallow, or, which is much the same thing, the very 
conceited, who can fail to see that the range of subjects 
to which you are here introduced is sufficient to last you 
for a life. History, the story of nations, so inexhaustible 
in moral interest, so rich in spiritual lessons ; Divinity, 
the study of our relation to God, and of the deepest 
utterances of His Eternal Spirit to the heart of man ; 
Science in all its branches whether it deal with fori as 
and numbers, or with those laws which God's own hand 
has written on the stars of heaven and the stone tablets 
of the earth; Language, the common instrument of 
every intelligent being that lives and thinks ; Antiquity, 
with its immortal lessons of many races, and specially 
of "the beauty which was Greece and the grandeur 
which was Rome ; " — there is not one of these studies 
which might not with profit occupy the intellect during 
a well-spent and serviceable life ; not one which may 
not be, to the holy and the humble, " a sunbeam from 

1 Tennyson, The Princess, 



192 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

the Father of Lights." And to profit in any one of 
these you must begin early. There are some things 
which, if you have not learnt thoroughly before the age 
of twelve, you will hardly learn thoroughly at all ; there 
are many others which must, in their elements, be 
mastered before you are seventeen, or you can never 
succeed in them. You may wish hereafter that you 
had done so, " but it will be too late, and your wishes 
will not give you back the power that is gone." 1 Now 
even the lowest ground for diligence in these studies 
cannot legitimately be despised. That lowest ground is 
that, for by far the most of you, your future will be 
affected very decisively by your present; that on the 
way in which you work now will depend largely the 
opportunities of earning your daily bread ; that even 
one year's idleness now may make to you all the dif- 
ference hereafter between a life reasonably prosperous, 
or heavily clouded by poverty and struggle. When the 
great Napoleon visited his old school at Brienne, he 
addressed these w 7 ords only to the assembled boys, 
"Boys, remember that every hour wasted at school 
means a chance of misfortune in future life." Now 
these considerations alone would make gross laziness 
and selfish sacrifice of duty to pleasure in a boy's life 
a flagrant folly; but the higher ground, the loftier 
motive, the consideration which should appeal most 
strongly to the clearest and noblest souls among you, 
is that it is not only a flagrant folly, but a dangerous 
sin. For the true end of knowledge is not curiosity, is 
not vanity, is not profit, but it is that we may build up 
others — and that is charity ; it is that we may be built 
up ourselves — and that is wisdom. 2 Sursum Corda, 

1 Bishop Temple. 

2 Sunt nam que qui scire volunt eo tantum fine ut sciant ; et turpis 



xx.] TEE OBJECTS OF SCHOOL LIFE. 193 

lift up your hearts. Let none of your motives fall 
short of the highest. Be diligent in order that by the 
habits in which such diligence will train you, if by 
nothing else, you may grow up to be, not a curse and 
a burden to your fellow-men, but " a profitable member 
of the Church and Commonwealth, and hereafter a 
partaker of the immortal glory of the resurrection." 
So then I trust that on this ground all of you— alike 
the little boys who have just joined our body, and the 
eldest of you who will have your last chance this term 
of paying your Opkrmpa to Marlborough by showing 
yourselves worthy sons of the School which has trained 
you — will, as part of your answer to the question 
" What doest thou here ? " reply distinctly, " I am here 
to be taught ; I am here to learn." 

(/3) For indeed teaching is but a part of the reason 
why you are here, and, as a higher end, you are here to 
he trained. It is only the few who are gifted ; only the 
few whose abilities and whose power of will can win 
them a foremost place ; only the few whose names can 
be recorded in our annals as having done intellectual 
honour to the teaching they have received. But I do 
hope that not the dullest boy here will ever think that, 
because he is dull — because he can never repay what 
he owes to Marlborough by making her name mors 
famous — that therefore he is less dear to her, or his 
interests less sacred to those who love her. When I 
recall the memories of those Marlburians whom for their 
virtue and their manliness I honour most — of those who 



curiositas est. Et sunt qui scire volunt, ut sciantur ipsi, et turpis 
vanitas est. Et sunt item qui scire volunt, ut scientiarn suam vendant, 
. . . et turpis qusestus est. Sed sunt quoque qui scire volunt, ut sedifi- 
cent, et charitas est ; et item qui scire volunt ut sedificentur, et pmdentia 
est." St. Bernard, Sermon xxxvi. Super Cantu. p. 608. 

M.S. O 



194 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

have ever seemed to me the worthiest, the noblest, and 
the truest — of those whose names I helieve to be 
written in heaven — it is not always of the ablest that 
I think, or of the most successful. The boys who leave 
us modest and manly, loyal and grateful, affectionate 
and courteous, humble and pure — and God grant that 
there may be always many such ! — do us infinitely more 
honour in its highest sense than they could have done 
by any amount of that cleverness which is not dignified 
by seriousness and by character ; and Marlborough is 
doing to the country a transcendently higher service if 
she can fill every grade and office of our national life 
with honourable, well-mannered, serious-minded, pure- 
hearted boys, than if we could be ever so pre-eminent 
for producing graceless capacity, conceited worthlessness, 
or brilliant vice. To train you to speak the truth 
always, to take Christ for your captain, and to do your 
duty to all the world ; to bring you up in the knowledge 
that your bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost, and 
that those temples must be kept pure and holy ; to set 
before you God's will, and that this is the will of God 
even your sanctification ; to make you rather die than 
lie, rather cut off your right hand than steal, rather pass 
through fire than betray into vice and wickedness a soul 
for which Christ died ; to make you feel how divine is 
the blush of modesty on young human countenances, 1 
how sweet is humility, " that lily of the valley which 
blossoms only in the Christian he&rt ; " 2 to inspire you 
with an honour so sensitive that it would feel a stain 
like a wound ; 3 to help you so instantly ; and so con- 
stantly to direct your lives by the high eternal law of 
duty, that you should ask about every act, not is it easy, 

1 Carlyle, Frederic the Great 2 Archbishop Leighton. 

3 Burke, 



xx.] THE OBJECTS OF SCHOOL LIFE. 195 

or is it popular, or is it pleasant, but Is it right ? — that 
is the education we most desire for you, it is in these 
things that you come to Marlborough to be trained. 
Oh try, on this first Sunday of another summer term, to 
set them distinctly before you in answer to the question, 
" What doest thou here ? " If this term passes without 
intellectual progress, it will so far be wasted and will be 
to you like an enemy in the rear ; but if it pass with 
no moral progress, with no strengthening of noble 
principles, no conquest over sinful tendencies, no 
subordination of the senses and the passions to law 
and to reason, then it will be worst than lost, worse 
than wasted, for then it will be a source of future 
difficulty, it may be even of future condemnation. It 
will be a fountain of bitter waters. It will be the 
creeping premonition of paralysis to come. 

III. So important is this period of your life. It is 
often spoken of as a preparation for life, but its main 
solemnity lies in the fact that it is not only a most 
momentous preparation for life, but also a most 
momentous part of it. Every day — we might almost 
say every hour, every moment of our mortal life has 
its own importance; for on any day of it death may 
come, and on any hour of it eternity may hang. But 
these days and hours are most important of all, because 
on them so many future days and hours may depend ; 
because the whole oak lies in the acorn ; because " fruit 
is seed." 1 It is a mysterious thing — one could almost 
weep to think of it — that the house of a young boy's 
soul is built as it were in the midst of enemies, on the 
edge of a precipice, on the ashes of a volcano ; and that 
the assaults upon constancy and upon character seem 
so often to have shaken it to the very foundation or 

1 George Eliot, Romola. 

o 2 



196 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

sapped it at the very base before the constancy is 
established, before the character is formed. But we 
cannot alter the fixed conditions of life ; and if to 
parents and to teachers this thought be full of mis- 
giving and of sadness, there is another which is full of 
encouragement and hope, which is that God is nigh unto 
all them that call upon Him, even all such as call upon 
Him faithfully; that no one can make another do wrong ; 
that the life and the death of each soul is in its own power; 
that in the case of the youngest boy, nay even of the 
weakest child, God never suffers any one to be tempted 
above that which he is able, but will with the temptation 
send also the way of escape. But, oh, if you have 
indeed realised all that I have been saying, how awful is 
the responsibility which these circumstances entail! 
You who are Prefects and Heads of houses, oh, let these 
thoughts help you to feel the meaning of an office which 
gives you more opportunity of doing good than you may 
have in many after years, and which consists far more of 
high duties than of special privileges. And you who 
are in the higher forms, who are older than the majority, 
who know more of the dangers and difficulties of life 
and of school life, how much of the happiness or the 
misery of your fellows depends on you ! And you who 
are Captains of class-rooms, of dormitories, of the Upper 
Schoolroom, who live in the very midst of your fellows, 
who know — what we cannot always know — which of 
them are good and which bad, which weak and which 
strong, which trustworthy and which treacherous — you, 
without whose cognisance either no bad influence can be 
exercised at all, or at any rate not for long — oh do not 
betray your trust ! There is one evil which neither* the 
eye of man nor angel can detect — it is hypocrisy. Your 
parents, your masters cannot even profess to be never 



xx.] THE OBJECTS OF SCHOOL LIFE. 197 

deceived in you. I do not know, perhaps none of those 
set over you may ever know, what this or that boy is — 
what a corrupt heart may lurk under the smiling coun- 
tenance, under the fair semblance what a bad, mean 
soul. But does no one know ? does not God know ? If 
I could, here and now, name any thoroughly wicked boy, 
if such there be, by name ; if I could bid him by name 
stand up in his place ; step forth into the presence of this 
congregation ; if there I could convict him of any evil 
he has done; if I could flash and brand upon his quiver- 
ing soul a sense of the enormity of that evil ; if I could 
deliver him as St. Paul did the offender of Corinth to 
Satan, because he has done the devil's work ; if it were 
given to mortal man to look on the hardened sinner 
with that eye, which, reading the inmost secrets of the 
hearts, " strook Gehazi with leprosy and Simon Magus 
with a curse;" 1 if, further, as he stood there, the power 
of life and death were ours, and we could raise our arm, 
and in the uplifted hand were such thunder as could 
hurl him blighted to the earth ; — if we could do this, 
would not disobedience, would not corruption be an 
awful thing, and might it not be that there may be here 
some guilty soul which would die away within it, and 
shiver as the last dead leaf of autumn shivers in the 
frosty wind ? We have no such power. But God has ; 
He knows you ; His eye is ever on you ; He has 
witnessed the worst actions of your lives ; He hears at 
this very moment every thought of your imagination, 
and every beating of your heart. The depths of track- 
less forests, the curtains of blackest midnight, cannot 
hide you from Him ; nor does He need any lightning 
for the punishment of apostasy ; a touch, a breath, the 
germ of an animalcula,, the sporule of a lichen, the 

1 Milton. 



198 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xx. 

microscopic seed of a pestilence, the invisible blight of 
an evening wind — these are enough to be the potent 
ministers of His awakened wrath ; and a child does not 
crush more easily the petal of a flower than He at a 
touch could dissolve into dust and ashes not only the 
insolent, guilty, polluted soul, but the very race to which 
we belong, the very globe we live on, the very universe 
which He has made. 

~ IV. Only let us remember for our comfort that this 
God, that this awful God, who made, who knows us, in 
Whose hands are the issues of life and death — that 
this God Whose will we may have rejected, Whose law 
we may have disobeyed — is also our Father. He has 
sent His Son to die for us, and to reconcile the world 
unto Himself. At morning and evening by your own 
bedsides, and all day long in the thoughts of your hearts 
you may seek Him, and here in this chapel you may 
hear His voice, and see His face. Oh ! seek Him here. 
Oh ! seek him early ; seek Him while there yet is time ; 
seek Him for your own sakes; for Christ's sake; for 
your brethren and companions' sakes : and let every one 
of us who may, at yonder Holy Table consecrate to Him 
the labours and efforts of this term — consecrate to 
Him ourselves, our souls and bodies, a reasonable, holy, 
and lively sacrifice. 

May 9th, 1875. 



SEEMON XXL 

EXCUSES TO MAN AND TO GOD. 

Luke xiv. 18. 
" I pray thee have me excused.'' 

The parable which you have just had read to you as 
the Gospel for the Day, might well be called the Parable 
of short-sighted folly, rendered more glaring by impo- 
tent excuse. Asked to the palace of a great man, the 
guests of course accept, — not only because they are 
bound by gratitude and allegiance, but because it is an 
honour and a delight. And yet when the hour comes, 
and, as is still usual in the East, the messengers go 
round to announce that all things are now ready, they 
all avail themselves of excuses, civil indeed, but as 
final as they are inadequate. One has bought a piece 
of ground, and is very sorry, but he must really go and 
see it. Another has just purchased five yoke of oxen, 
and is just starting to try them. A third has married, 
and thinks his narrow, absorbing, and selfish domesticity 
an adequate excuse for any possible neglect. Not 
deigning to notice their paltry excuses, in just scorn 
and just anger, the great man cancels his invitation, 
and sends for other guests. In vain, later on, haply 
shall these long to enter the lighted hall. Their chance 
is over ; other guests are seated ; the door is shut ; and 



200 . IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

as they shiver without in the cold and in the darkness, 
their own consciences can but echo the burden of 
their own rejection, 

" Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now." 

I. 1. Before we consider the subject of their excuses, 
let us first consider the sin and folly from which these 
excuses were the pitiful refuge. For the behaviour of 
these guests may well strike you as strange, absurd, 
improbable. Yes, but that is one of the very points 
of the parable ; for yet more incredible, yet more absurd, 
is the conduct of which that refusal is the illustration 
and the antitype. What is that ? It is that God, the 
great King of all the earth, invites our souls to the 
palace of His heavens, to the banquet of His love ; — to 
all things that are noble and eternal ; to the heavenly 
manna, and the fair fruits of the Tree of Life, and 
river of His pleasures, and an eternal home and an 
unfading crown. And the soul refuses, delays, turns 
aside — for what ? To feed on ashes ; to eat the dust all 
the days of its life ; to pluck the crumbling bitterness 
of the Dead Sea apples ; to rusted treasures and broken 
cisterns; to guilty joys which, after brief madness, end 
in famine, and degradation, and hopeless death. Is it, 
then, that the soul does not believe in those good things 
which pass understanding, which God promises to His 
faithful children ? Yes, it does believe them ; but that 
faith is without works, and dead. Why ? Because of the 
strong sorcery of the present, the fatal fascination of 
the near; because, when it has once admitted the slavery 
of sin, to the soul — as to the beasts that perish — the 
here and the now are more than the eternal and the 
unseen. Put the future, if you will, wholly out of the 
question; suppose for the moment that there is no 



xxi.] EXCUSES TO MAN AND TO GOD. 201 

heaven, no hell, no immortality beyond the grave, but 
that nothing more awaits us after this poor life save 
" the intolerable indignity of dust to dust." Yet even 
then the voices of all men in all ages — the guilty no 
less than the innocent — have declared aloud, — the one 
in their full beatitude, the other in their wild despair, — 
that vice is always misery and sin — always death — and 
that holiness is the only joy or peace. And not even 
the veriest and most headstrong fool can disbelieve this, 
for it is the unanimous experience of all the world. 
How is it then that men do follow vice, and live in daily 
disobedience to God law ? It is for the reason I have 
already given, and which all life illustrates. 

2. Two youths once started together on a way which 
led over the desert to their father's house. At first their 
road lay by fountains, and by groves of orange and 
pomegranate, with which one as he passed stored his 
scrip and filled his water-skin, while the other, though 
gently warned, went forward without a thought and 
without a care. Together they reached the desert ; and 
soon the great sun was flaming over them, — and the 
burning heat, and the scorching thirst, and the weary 
toil pressed most on him who was worst provided. At 
last they saw more and more distinctly before them the 
sight which many a traveller sees. A bright city seemed 
near them in its green oasis — with palms and palaces 
and runnels of silver water — while voices of strange 
fascination lured them there. But amid those tempting 
calls they heard continually a still small voice, sounding 
like the voice of their father from afar. " And look not," 
it whispered, " and listen not ; that enticing loveliness 
is the deadly mirage ; those sounds are the voices of 
the evil spirits in the wilderness, and they who listen 
to them return no more." And one of them knew that 



202 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

it was so in his miserable heart, but more and more 
after those alluring voices, and more and more towards 
that gleaming falsehood which faded and fled before 
him, he turned aside into those haunted solitudes. And 
when the twilight came with its dew and stars the one 
was resting in his father's happy home ; and they who 
with heavy hearts followed the wandering track of the 
other, saw only a dead body on the sands, — heard only 
the flapping of the vulture's wing. Alas ! what is this 
but the transparent allegory of ten thousand lives ; the 
wilderness — the temptation — the wandering — the warn- 
ing voices — the delusion — the self-deception — the agony 
of vain remorse — the despair of unrepentant death. 
And it all comes from the refusal of the soul to 
resist the influences immediately around it, and to 
listen to that loving call which summons it from the 
ruinous treacheries of the world and of the senses to 
the glories of its Monarch's banquet, and the holiness 
of its Father's home. 

II. But leaving this aspect of the parable, let us turn 
now from the refusal to the excuses that followed it. 
"They all began with one consent to make excuse." 

To make excuses, my brethren, seems inherent in 
our nature. It rises from our pride. We rarely see 
ourselves as others see us, or even as we see others. 
We are so full of self-love that it seems like a miracle 
of grace when a man frankly, humbly, penitently admits 
and confesses himself to be in the wrong. 

" Come now, will the doer at this last of all 
Dare to say I did wrong, rising in his faU ? " 

e 

No ! in nine cases out of ten he will not. He will make 
excuses. No one can be placed in a position of authority 
without seeing daily instances of the habit; which, 



xxi.] EXCUSES TO MAN AND TO GOB. 203 

being all but universal in little things, is yet more fatally 
so in great. Suffer me to illustrate it in the words of 
another. " Excuse-making," says one who knew boys 
well, " is the scourge of boyhood and of school. I might 
venture, perhaps, to refer even in this place to a very 
common and familiar form of excuse in which one of 
you being late for a school-engagement pleads that his 
watch was wrong ; perhaps it was, and yet several things 
may go to make this a mere excuse ; perhaps he knew 
beforehand that it was wrong ; perhaps he might have 
prevented it from being wrong ; or perhaps he had other 
means of information within reach had he used them, 
but refrained from doing so that he might keep his 
excuse. And when any obvious duty is neglected, each 
of those who is thus failing has his excuse — his excuse 
to himself, to his parents, to his masters ; his excuse 
varying a little with the day, but substantially the same 
each day, capable of modification or reproduction at 
pleasure, and sufficient at all events to palliate self- 
reproach, if not to inspire confidence. And thus there 
are those who never can be surprised into a frank con- 
fession. They are always armed against blame. The 
fault was not theirs ; they were interrupted ; they were 
tired ; they thought they knew it ; they thought they 
should have had time ; they had meant to get up early ; 
they had learnt every part of the lesson but that one 
line ; they could have answered everything except that 
one question; they were only just late ; they forgot; — 
anything in fact and everything but a frank admission 
of fault ; and so on through a labyrinth of pleas and 
evasions — in one plain word excuses — till a miserable 
habit is formed, and all room for the operation of a 
candid self-judgment is precluded and barred. And 
when special pleas are exhausted they find an excuse 



204 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

in their very failings ; they are so indolent, they say, 
constitutionally; they are so weak, so irresolute, so 
procrastinating ; in the tone it may be of regret or 
evasion, but still with the effect of apologising for the 
less fault by the greater, for the particular by the 
general, of escaping censure for the fault by the help 
of the failing." x 

This is, perhaps, enough to show you, by simple 
instances, and mainly in the words of another, the com- 
monness of excuses ; but I want you now to consider 
with me their hollowness, their meanness, their self- 
deceiving character. And this is implied by the very 
language of my text : " I pray thee have me excused." 
e%e fjb€ nraparrjprjfievov — hold me as an " excused " ; treat 
me obligingly just this once; kindly make a special 
exception in my case. The very phrase shows the 
misgiving of the speaker; and scripture — in its plain 
and simple narratives — will show you better than ten 
thousand volumes of sham philosophy and would-be 
profundity, the radical falsity of this self-deceiving 
spirit. Take one or two excuses from the Bible — how 
hollow they are, how mean they are. Take Eve in her 
sin and shame ; is there, even at that dread moment — 
when the awful voice speaks to her, and the sounding foot- 
step is heard amid the garden trees — is there any frank 
confession of that deadly disobedience ? No ; but the 
usual subterfuge — a weak laying of the blame on others. 
* The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Does Adam 
come any more nobly out of the trial ? No ; but with 
ungenerous complaint and sullen recrimination. " The 
woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me 
of the tree, and I did eat." I choose cases, observe, in 

1 The substance of this paragraph is borrowed from an admirable 
sermon by Dr. Yaughan. 



xxi.] EXCUSES TO MAN AJSD TO GOD. 205 

which there is no chance of denying the fact. If there 
were, is there not too much cause to fear — since, there 
is so near an affinity, so undeniable a resemblance 
between excuses and lies — since, in fact, excuses are but 
the younger, and as yet less hardened, children in the 
great family of falsehood — must we not fear that the 
self-conscious pride which holds up against blame the 
wicker shield of excuses, might otherwise snatch at 
the sevenfold shield of lies ? u Whence comest thou 
Gehazi ? " asks Elisha of his servant. The man does 
not know that he has been seen, that he has been 
detected already. And how smoothly, how unblushingly, 
though a prophet's servant, he slides at once into the glib 
and blank denial. Whence cometh he ? whence should he 
have come ? " Thy servant went no whither," he says, 
looking up with a plausible air of injured and innocent 
surprise. For him no after excuses were possible, for 
on him at once, with that "went not my heart with 
thee ? " the white leprosy fell like blight. But in the 
case of the unhappy Saul we have both the prevenient 
falsity and the subsequent excuse. The great ban has 
been laid upon Amalek. False to his plighted word, 
he has violated and evaded it, and going to meet Samuel, 
smoothly says, " Blessed be thou of the Lord : I have 
performed the commandment of the Lord." "What 
meaneth then this bleating of sheep in mine ears?" is 
the stern and brief reply. " Oh ! that is only what the 
people have done ; they have kept the best of the sheep 
and the oxen — forsooth — to sacrifice unto the Lord ; and 
the rest (yes, all the vile and all the valueless) we have 
utterly destroyed." And even then, when plainly 
reproved for his sin, his excuses are not over. " Yea, I 
have obeyed the Lord, and took Agag, but the people 
(again) took of the spoil," as though he had said (and oh 



20(5 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

how like it is to what we often hear ! ) I did do my duty ; 
it was the people that did not do theirs ; and even they 
did do theirs, only they kept some of the oxen, and 
even that was to sacrifice." " Behold, to obey," says the 
indignant prophet, tearing away the cobwebs of his 
hypocrisy and emptiness, " to obey is better than sacri- 
fice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." Then, at last, 
when it is quite worthless, when there is no nobility 
and no manliness left in it, comes the reluctant con- 
fession, " I have sinned ; " but even when this has been 
wrung from him, then once more comes the mean habi- 
tual recurrence to self-excuse and the blame of others. 
" I have sinned: because I feared the people, and obeyed 
their voice." The scene is very instructive to show us 
how persistent excuses are, and how utterly selfish, and. 
how meanly self-deceptive ; yet there is one more excuse 
in Scripture which in its sheer imbecile futility is even 
worse, and is wholly unsurpassed. Yet, perhaps, we may 
see our own tendencies immediately reflected in it, for it 
was a great man, a great priest, who made it. Moses is 
alone on Sinai, and in forty days the people have forgotten 
all, and want a visible idol, a low base idol, whom they 
can serve with sin and shame. Aaron, in his weak com- 
plicity, agrees. He carefully and elaborately makes them 
a gilded calf, and they serve it with vile and sensual 
worship. Then, in hot anger, — shattering in his wrath 
the granite tablets of the yet unpromulgated law, — like a 
messenger of doom, and with the glory of holy indignation 
on his countenance, comes Moses, striding down the hill, 
and flings into the dust their wretched idol, and stamps 
it to powder, and strews it on the water, and makes the 
children of Israel drink it, and then turns in his fury 
upon the trembling Aaron, and asks him, with bitter 
upbraiding, how he could have brought this great sin 



xxi.] EXCUSES TO MAN AND TO GOD. 207 

upon the people. " Oh, my lord, let not thine anger 
wax hot : thou knowest the people, that they are set on 
mischief," and so on. " And I said unto them, Whoso- 
ever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it 
me : then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this 
calf!" "There came out this calf!" Can the force of 
imbecile fatuity go farther ? In no passage of Scripture 
is there a larger or more cutting irony, yet the irony is 
not too bitter or too broad, nor the smile on the lips 
of the sacred historian too entirely scornful, for the 
utter folly and craven feebleness alike of Aaron's excuses, 
and, alas ! of ours. 

And alas ! if these excuses do not even deceive our- 
selves, can we think that they deceive God ? No. God 
has laid down a law that cannot be broken. It is all in 
vain for the sinner to stammer out, " I was surprised into 
it," or " I did not think/' or " Only this once," or " It 
was only just," or " I was not the only one who did it/' 
or " It was the fault of my school, or of my companions, 
and not mine." No ; this is all useless. Nature is one 
name for the material laws of God, and Nature may 
reveal to us something of His will. Does Nature take 
excuses ? Is there weak pity, is there relenting good 
nature in her ? Or does he who violates her law suffer, 
suffer always, suffer inevitably ? does not the fire always 
burn, and the water drown, and the lightning fall, and the 
pitch defile ? Does nature spare the drunken man ? does 
nature spare the dissolute youth ? or does she stamp 
her brand upon his forehead, and strike her paralysis 
through all his frame ? Stern as necessity, inexorable 
as death, does she not proclaim that he who trangresses 
her decree, be he the very favourite of the world, shall 
suffer for it, and that she does not swerve aside from her 
inevitable course ? May not Nature thus teach us to 



208 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. xxi. 

fear nature's God ? Excuses will never cease on earth ; 
never cease till we stand at the solemn bar of God. 
Then they will. Then " every mouth will be stopped." 
Then each self-deceiving apology will sound too blas- 
phemous, each miserable excuse too ridiculous to utter. 
Were it not better now to anticipate the revelations of 
that day ? to judge ourselves that we be not judged ? to 
make no excuses to ourselves, none to our fellows, none 
to our God now — to humble ourselves under the mighty 
hand of God — to lay our mouth in the dust, if so be 
there may be hope. 

Hope — for though in the physical world ("here be no 
forgiveness of sins, in the spiritual world, for the peni- 
tent, and only for the penitent, there is. Where can it 
be found ? In Christ, and in Christ alone. If we find 
it not in Him, we cannot find it anywhere. There is no 
other name under Heaven whereby we must be saved. 
Oh, not with excuses ; not with any fancied palliation 
or fancied merit, but with deep penitence, with utter 
self-abasement, with absolute confession to Almighty 
God, — so let us come to Him, for so alone can we 
acceptably seek Him. 

" Just as I am, without one plea, 

Save that Thy blood was shed for me, 
And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee, 
Lamb of God, I come. 

* * Just as I am, and waiting not 
To rid my soul of one dark blot, 
To Thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot, 
Lamb of God, I come." 

June Uth, 1874. 



SEEMON XXII. 
THE TEMPLE OF THE GOD OF TRUTH. 

2 Chron. xxxvi. 23. 

" And lie hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which 
is in Judah. Who is there among you of all His people ? The Lord 
his God be with him, and let him go up." 

You have just heard these words in the Second Lesson 
of to-day, and the thoughts which they suggest seem 
applicable to the present position of us all. The Israel- 
ites were returning to their home. Difficulties and 
dangers on every side encompassed them ; but whatever 
those difficulties and dangers might be, their one duty, 
their one ambition, their one purpose, their one hope, 
was to build a temple to the Lord their God. It was to 
be for them an effort, at once strenuous and sacred, at 
once united and individual. 

I. It was to be a material temple that they were to 
build. This is the first conception which men always 
form of the habitation of God — places set apart to His 
honour, hallowed by the associations of His worship ; 
places like the chapel in which we are met to-day, — the 
outward beauty of which we desire to make a symbol 
of the love and honour which we owe to God, but 
which, I trust, every one of you will still more earnestly 
desire to honour with love and reverence — to hallow by 
seriousness and godly fear. God may be near you in 

M.S. F 



210 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

every place ; but nowhere nearer to your boyhood than 
in this your school-chapel. If daily, as you enter, each 
of you will kneel low on your knees before God's foot- 
stool, entreating Him to banish from your cleansed soul 
all low desires, all dreamy reveries, all guilty thoughts, 
that the words of your mouth and the meditations of 
your heart may be acceptable in His sight; — if you 
determine, from the first, faithfully to fulfil the simple 
duty of joining with your own lips in the hymns and 
responses, and by the Amen of serious hearts, making 
each prayer your own, — then here most assuredly, to the 
infinite help and blessing of your lives, will you be 
enabled day by day to see more and more brightly the 
Face of God ; and pure Faith and meek Charity and 
every "hovering angel girt with golden wings," will 
here take you by the hand and waive off each baser 
temptation, till, in your own earthly lives, you have 
found a place for the temple for the Lord, an habitation 
for the mighty God of Jacob. 

II. But though you may best seek Him here, you may 
find God everywhere. The Most High dwelleth not in 
temples made with hands. This great glorious world 
is His. The sky is His, with its driving clouds, with 
its sunset colourings, with its overarching canopy of 
stainless blue. The trees of the forest are His, with 
every moss and lichen that inlay their gnarled boughs 
with silver and emerald, and the flowers that nestle 
at their feet, and the birds that sing among their 
branches. This long summer which you have all 
enjoyed is His, and the autumn with its raiment of 
gold and purple ; — and the sea is His, and He made 
it, and all that moveth therein. " What you see around 
you is not — as the obtrusive ignorance of fancied 
wisdom has often so arrogantly proclaimed to us— 



xxil] THE TEMPLE OF THE GOD OF TRUTH 211 

is not dull, dead matter, not blind and formless law, 
but the translucence of a divine energy, the work of 
Him who layeth the beams of His chambers upon the 
waters, and maketh the clouds His chariot, and walketh 
upon the wings of the wind. The darkened and un- 
spiritual intellect, wise in its own conceit, may distenant 
creation of its God ; but the fact that there are blind 
eyes does not disprove the reality of the light. The 
proof of that Light is simply that it shines ; nor does 
it need other evidence save its own existence. The 
materialist may proclaim to us that to him all is dark- 
ness, but the senses are not man's only teachers, and 
the humble and the spiritual-hearted shall feel in this 
universe of God no dead combination of chance atoms, 
but a 

' ' Sense of something far more deeply interfused, 
Wliose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round oc^an and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ; " 1 

and that something is none other than the presence of 
the Lord his God. 

III. But though to all who know and love Him God 
is the Soul of the visible universe, and we " climb by 
these sunbeams to the Father of Lights, ,, He hath a 
nearer and a truer temple still. The earth hath He 
made, indeed, for the children of men, and it shines 
with His handiwork ; but it is spirit only that can know 
spirit, and God's truest temple is the upright heart and 
pure. I look around upon you all — upon these youthful 
bodies into which God has breathed the breath of life, 
and which so have become living souls. I look around 
me, and I say — Some may be neglected, some desecrated ; 
in the shrines of some there may be secret idols, 

1 Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey. 

P 2 



212 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [semi. 

worshipped with the flame of strange fires and the smoke 
of unhallowed incense ; but even of the most ruined 
it is true now — and God grant that it may be more and 
more true hereafter ! — that the temple of the Lord, the 
temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these ! 
What ? Know ye not, every one of you, that your 
bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth in 
you, — temples which you ought to be raising now and 
to the end, — temples which God has given us all charge 
to build and hallow, and of which I ask you, " Who is 
there among you of all His people? The Lord his 
God be with him, and let him go up." 

IV. For in striving to hallow in your own mortal 
bodies a house for God's habitation, you will all be 
joining to build yet another temple — God's last, best, 
truest temple, — a Church, that is, a society of God's 
children; — in this instance the society of a great English 
school, rising invisibly and silently to God's honour 
— a school in which God wishes and loves to dwell — a 
school " with Christ for its one foundation, while those 
for whom Christ died are the materials of which it is 
composed." And this is an eternal temple. The day 
shall come in some far-off time when our chapels and 
our schools shall be in ruins, and the stones of them 
shall have crumbled into dust; but when that day 
comes, we, as living stones in that spiritual and eternal 
structure, may long have been fitly framed together and 
grown into a holy temple which time effaceth not, and 
where God continually dwells. This — the temple of 
God in a Christian school — this is the temple which 
God specially charges every one of us, from the least 
to the greatest, to build for Him to-day. It was no 
easy task of old for Israel; it will be no easy task 
for us. They did it in anxious labour, and amid many 



xxii.] TEE TEMPLE OF THE GOD OF TRUTH. 213 

perils, and so must we. Their enemies came scoffing. 
"What do these feeble Jews?" asked Sanballat the 
Horonite. " If a fox go up, he shall break down their 
stone wall/' sneered Tobias the Ammonite. But they 
went on, because the people had a mind to work. And 
when their enemies conspired by force to hinder them, 
they did as we must do. They set a watch against 
them, day and night ; and each of the people had his 
spear, and sword, and bow; and each as he builded 
with one of his hands, with the other he held a weapon, 
and so, sword on thigh, toiled at the high labour from 
the rising of the sun till the stars appeared. And so 
must we build ; — all of us unitedly ; — all of us prayer- 
fully ; — all of us from morning till night ; — all armed 
and watchful ; — all working with a will. For God has 
charged us to build, and the work is great and large. 
Will even one of you be such a traitor as to join with 
scoffing opponent or conspiring enemy ? Will even one 
of you be such a caitiff as to be idle himself, and to 
spoil the work of his brethren ? Arise ! and build for 
God ! " Who is there among you of all His people ? 
The Lord his God be with him, and let him go up." 

V. But what kind of a temple does God require ? On 
what condition will the Lord our God who is so high, 
deign to dwell in the house we build ? I will mention 
one condition. 

God is essentially and before all things a God of 
truth. If God is to be with us there must be truth 
here, and by truth I mean not only truthfulness, which 
is a part of it, but reality ; not merely that absence of 
falsehood which is its first element, but absolute sin- 
cerity. What a grand thing it is in a human life — what 
hope i f gives that a boy will grow up worthily to that 
virtue which is nothing but perfect manliness — when 



214 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

everything that he is and does is built upon the 
large basis of sincerity ; when we know that, whatever 
his faults may be, there is no sham about him, no 
thievish corners in his character, no subterranean 
jealousies, no smouldering malignities. He may strike 
the downright blow, but he will not use the poisoned 
dagger ; and if he smite it will be by broad daylight, and 
in the face, not at the back and in the dark. His character 
may not be perfect, but at least it is transparent ; his 
countenance may not be winning, but at least he does 
not wear a mask. If we know that we may trust his 
honesty and his straightforwardness ; if we feel that he 
would rather die than lie; if his worst enemy yet 
might fearlessly appoint him a judge and arbiter : then 
I say that, having clean hands and a pure heart, he who 
hath not lift up his soul to vanity nor sworn to deceive 
his neighbour, this man shall receive the blessing of the 
Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. 

a. Since, then, this school must be built up into an 
habitation for the God of truth, let us see to it that 
we be true. We must be true first to one another. Not 
one of us stands alone. We are bound together by 
common hopes, common interests, common duties, 
common affections. If we be true to one another 
we shall not seek our own: there can then be no 
treacheries, no falsities among us ; no influences that 
subtly corrupt, no lies that secretly undermine ; but in 
word and deed a nobility and a loyalty which renders 
all baseness impossible between man and man. We 
who are set in authority over you must be thoroughly 
loyal to you; loyal to you by never forgetting how 
solemn is our responsibility for those your interests 
which are entrusted to our care ; loyal to you by con- 
sidering your welfare more even than our own ; loyal to 



xxii.] THE TEMPLE OF THE GOD OF TRUTH. 215 

you by seeing that, in whatever other way you may lose 
or fail, you shall never lose by one hour of our idleness, 
or fail by one carelessness of our neglect ; loyal to you 
by never allowing a like or a dislike, an offence or 
an impatience, to deflect for one moment the even scale 
of our impartial justice ; loyal to you by never allowing 
an impulse of anger or a thought of popularity to 
divert our judgment by one hairsbreadth from what is 
right ; loyal to you, therefore, by often doing, not what 
you like, but what you need, — not what might please 
you for the moment, but what will be best for you in 
the end. God forbid that I should shrink from setting 
before you our duties as masters no less frankly and 
faithfully than yours as boys ; and these are our duties 
— to meet all your wishes half-way when they are good 
or innocent, but never to indulge them when they are 
unwise or wrong; to make the path of labour, and of 
knowledge, and of self-denial as smooth before you as 
God permits, but to do our utmost, at any cost, to check 
your feet when they would stray into the paths of 
death, or the steps that take hold on hell. All this you 
know, and I feel an entire confidence that here, if any- 
where, the ruled and the ruling are one in heart. For 
as we to you, so must you be no less loyal to us ; loyal 
to us even when we ask you to do hard things and to 
make great sacrifices ; loyal to us even when you do 
not yet see why certain restrictions are necessary, or 
certain studies desirable ; loyal to us, even if in all 
honesty, we have failed to understand your character, 
or failed to appreciate your efforts ; loyal to us for having 
tried faithfully to serve you, even when you cease to be 
under our authority. For your gratitude we ask not ; 
from the noble it will come spontaneously, from the 
ignoble it never comes at all, nor does it even enter into 



216 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [sbrm. 

our calculations. Enough for us if, whether grateful or 
ungrateful, we can help you a little on life's hard and 
thorny road. But more than this, you must be loyal 
not only to us, but to one another. When you daily meet 
in the school, in the classroom, in the dormitory, in 
the playground, cherish in your hearts not only a holy 
charity for one another, but with it a deep reverence for 
the awfulness before God of your common nature and 
your common immortality. Yes ! be true to one another. 
Behold how good and pleasant a thing it is, brethren, 
to live together in unity. In lowliness of heart let each 
of you esteem others better than himself. Bear ye one 
another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. Oh, you, 
who are elder, while you lessen each other's trials by a 
friendship full of manly and mutual honour, make it your 
highest common duty to shelter the young, the weak, the 
inexperienced, so that neither cruelty, nor thoughtless- 
ness, nor, worse than all else, the deadly curse and plague- 
spot of impurity inflict on their souls an irreparable harm. 
Build God's temple in kindness, by seeing that there be 
no such thing as a bully to vex, unhindered, the life of 
his fellows ; build it in manliness, by seeing that no one 
elder or younger boy be allowed, unchecked, to profane 
the sacred name of friendship by corrupt and spurious 
fancies, which, beginning in effeminacy and vanity, end 
in shame and degradation. Yes ; if you would build 
the temple of the Lord you must be true to one another. 
/3. But remember that you cannot be quite true to 
one another unless you are true to your own selves. 
As our great poet says : — 

" To thine own self be true, 
And it shall follow as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man. " 

And to be true to yourselves is to be true to your 



xxii.] THE TEMPLE OF TEE GOD OF TRUTH. 217 

higher nature — true to the aims and purposes of an 
immortal soul, created in God's image and redeemed 
into His adoption. He who degrades God's high ideal 
for his mortal life — he who sows to the flesh and not to 
the spirit — he who prefers the death of sin to the life of 
righteousness — he who to the impulses of his lower 
nature sacrifices the inspirations of his higher and 
eternal nature, as Adam did when he flung away his 
Eden of innocence for the forbidden fruit, as Esau did 
when for one mess of meat he sold his birthright, as 
Saul did when he suffered one raging envy to poison 
his whole existence, as David did when he debased his 
soul to be trampled in the mire by one evil lust — such 
a one is a traitor to himself. It is sometimes said of 
a man that he is his own worst enemy; but this, alas ! 
is true of many a man in a sense far deeper than that 
in which it is ordinarily used. An enemy might injure 
for a time, but what enemy, short of Satan's self, w ould 
destroy another with a subtle, everlasting, irremediable 
destruction, as he who sells his soul for nought ? To be 
true to yourself you must take as the one law of your 
being that only which is best, and purest, and likest God. 
7. Eor as you cannot be true to one another without 
being true to yourselves, so neither can you be true to 
yourselves if you are not true to God. He has made 
your heart His dwelling-place; you must be true to 
Him by not defiling it with idols. He has made the 
fortress of your soul strong for Himself : you must -be 
true to Him by not betraying it to devils. He has 
given you talents and opportunities : you must be true 
to Him by employing them in His service. He has 
entrusted to you, as a labourer, the vineyard which His 
right hand hath planted : you must be true to Him by 
yielding Him its fruits of increase. Oh ! strive to be 



218 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xxii. 

true to Him by obeying His commandments ; to be true 
to Him in your daily prayers by bringing Him real sins 
to be pardoned, real wants to be supplied ; to be true to 
Him in this His house, coming before Him with meek 
heart and due reverence : by coming here not to dream, 
or to sleep, or to smile, or to trifle, or to look, or to be 
looked at, but to praise and pray ; by listening to the 
messages He sends you here as to words addressed to 
your individual souls. And one such message He is 
speaking to all of you now. The elder of you — the 
Prefects, the Heads of Houses, the Captains of Class- 
rooms and Dormitories — He bids you protect the weak, 
punish the wicked, put down with a strong hand all evil 
doing, support and countenance whatsoever things are 
pure, true, lovely, and of good report. And no less to the 
younger — even to the youngest new boy amongst us — 
He says, Be strong in the Lord, for moral weakness is 
very nearly akin to active wickedness. You, too, must 
help us to build God's temple. " Who is there among 
you of all His people ? The Lord his God be with 
him, and let him go up." 

Sept. 20, 1874. 



SERMON XXIII. 
DRIFTING AWAY. 

Heb. ii. 1. y* 

"Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things 
which we have heard, lest at anytime we should let them slip." 

Once, in the safe harbour of a great bay, amid scenes 
not specially beautiful or circumstances wholly delight- 
ful, yet sheltered from every serious and fatal storm, 
there was anchored a little boat, which contained three 
youths. They were brothers, and had been bidden to 
wait there till towards the sunset, when a vessel would 
come to fetch them away ; and they had been carefully 
warned that the bay was less safe than it looked, and 
that beyond the harbour-bar the sea was perilous and 
vast. One of these three youths, who, although the 
youngest, had the air of an altogether nobler race, felt a 
deep and instinctive horror of disobeying the command. 
The second of the three was a twin brother, a little older 
than this one, — attractive, brilliant, and capable of the 
highest things, but so apt to be misled by self-will and 
blinded by delusion, that when he grew wise in his own 
conceit, " there was more hope of a fool than of him." 
The third, though in every respect inferior to his brothers 
and base in aspect, except only when his features reflected 
some family resemblance to theirs, yet being the eldest, 
and physically the strongest, was constantly trying 
to control and master them. Capable of admirable 



220 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

usefulness when he submitted to their guidance, he was 
so violent and headstrong that there had never been any 
instance in their lives when he took the lead, in which 
all three had not been more or less injured or disgraced; 
nor was it without misgiving as to the result, that a 
father who loved them had left them together in the 
boat to-day. 

But during the early morning hours nothing went 
wrong. They amused themselves innocently, each 
according to his own bent. Now and then, as he passed 
by, some passenger upon the shore, or sailor in another 
boat, would talk with them, and seeing that they were but 
boys, would sometimes remind them that they must be 
careful. To such words the youngest always listened 
respectfully, even when the elder brother would hear 
them impatiently, and the second with a conceited smile. 
But an hour or two had barely passed by when the 
eldest boy got weary. Indolent and ill-conditioned, he 
let the time hang heavy on his hands ; and at last, in an 
evil, idle moment, stepped to the boat's prow, and gazed 
long and earnestly towards the forbidden sea. It did 
not look dangerous — only the lightest breeze appeared 
to ruffle it ; and as he gazed on its magic sparkle, and 
listened to the light laugh of its waves upon the shore, 
a longing, yearning curiosity flowed into his^ heart as 
with a siren song. The longer he gazed the more pas- 
sionate grew his desire to sail away; and nothing checked 
him but an indefinable misgiving, as long as one brother 
faintly dissuaded, and the other warned and entreated 
him from his purpose. And soon the second, who was 
much under his influence, began to waver and hesitate. 
Perhaps after all it did not matter much. The warnings 
of peril might be only old wives' fables, as in his selfish 
depravity an enemy who wore the mask of friendship 



xxiii.] DRIFTING AWAY. 221 

had subtly hinted to him. The more he wavered, the 
more he got to share and to support the bad longing of 
his brother. Under such united pressure the youngest 
failed to hold out; his half-remonstrances were first, 
imperiously overruled, then contemptuously neglected, 
At last he hardly checked his brother's hands when, after 
long handling and trying the rope, they flung to the 
winds all that had been told them, knit their minds to 
the desperate resolve, slipped the hawser from the shore, 
tugged up the heavy anchor from its hold, hoisted the 
light sail, and the boat swung free. 

Their course at first was not quite smooth ■ though 
pulled up from its hold, yet the anchor was of massive 
iron. Here and there it dragged along the beach, giving 
the boat a troubled motion ; here and there it caught 
upon the rocks, pulling the boat up with a sudden shock. 
More than once they were reduced to seriousness, and 
half determined to listen to their younger brother and 
to stop ; and all the more because they did not feel 
quite happy or at ease. But the eldest urged that, having 
once slipped anchor, it was a pity to have committed that 
fault for nothing ; and the second was confident that no 
harm would come of it after all ; and even the youngest, 
corrupted by his brothers, began to share that guilty 
longing for the sea. For soon they felt a kind of deli- 
rious exultation as the new scenes sped by them, bathed 
to their imagination in the colours of enchantment. 
Once indeed they were imperilled on a sandbank. Once 
they were met by another boat, hastily returning, with 
frightened, outwearied rowers, and strained and broken 
oars. And when they reached the harbour-bar there 
was a great roar of waves, and the boat was almost 
swamped. But they were caught just then in a sudden 
gust, and their sail was up. Almost unconscious of what 



222 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

they did, they shot over the seething bar, — and then 
they were in the open sea. 

And there, when gradually the sunlight began to 
fade from dark and heaving expanse, and the seductive 
treachery of the placid waters to be flecked with angry 
foam, and the blackness of clouds which had been slowly 
gathering over them to burst into rain and storm, the 
youngest brother, who had often turned homewards his 
timid glances, did pluck up courage, and by his tears 
and entreaties prevail on them to strike sail, and begin 
to row back. But alas ! that rowing back was a desperate 
effort ! — the wind was against them ; the waves broke 
over them; their arms were weaker than once they were; 
their very wills seemed to have been smitten with para- 
lysis : and, worse than all, they found that they were now 
in the fatal grasp of a powerful current, against which they 
thought it in vain to struggle, and fear and shame would 
not suffer them to make signals of distress ; and in the 
last glimpse of them which was seen from far by those 
who loved them, the two elder were seated in sullen de- 
fiance at the prow, and the face of the third was hidden 
in his hands, as he sat apart in stupefied despair. And 
what happened to them could only be conjectured by the 
wreck that had befallen many another boat on those fatal 
waves. Of these all which was known was that some 
had been seized by pirates ; and some foundered in the 
deep sea ; and some been shattered to pieces on rocky 
headlands or sunken reefs ; — but one sad hope was left 
— because some, aided by merciful change, of wind and 
tide, had struggled, bruised and weary, into other and 
bleaker harbours, where, by painful endeavour, their 
anchor would just hold out ; and some, even at the last 
moment of desperation, had been saved by the lifeboat, 
destitute and shattered, and with the total loss of all. 



xxiii.] DRIFTING AWAY. 223 

The youngest of you will have seen that those 
things are an allegory, and will perhaps guess 
something of those moral laws to which the allegory 
points; but only a few of the elder of you will know 
that it is simply an expansion of my text. "We ought 
to give the more earnest heed to the things that we 
have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip ; " 
for that word " let them slip," is in the original fjbrj irote 
7rapapf)vcb/jL€v, lest perchance we should drift away from 
them. In the Greek usage, water, any brook that dis- 
appears, is said irapappuv, but anything which is borne 
along on the surface of that flowing wave — any boat, 
for instance, which is loose upon its current is said 
irapappvr]vac, to float, or drift away. And the writer bids 
us not drift away from the things we have heard. For he 
has begun by telling us that of old God spake to our 
fathers 7ro\vfjL€p£)? teal iroXvrpoira)^, " at sundry times 
and in divers manners " or, with more accuracy, f rag- 
mentarily and multifariously ; fragmentarily, as in the 
Old Testament, now revealing God's unity, now man's 
immortality, finally man's redemption; and multifariously, 
now by dreams, now by Urim, now by prophets ; and of 
these prophets sometimes a king, sometimes a shepherd; 
now an exile, now a gatherer of sycamore leaves. But in 
these last days, in this new dispensation, not fragment- 
arily, but in one final whole ; not multifariously, but by 
one divine, eternal Voice, hath He spoken unto us by His 
Son. Terekearai, it is finished ; the revelation is finished 
now, the vision sealed, the Son Himself has come to 
His labourers in the vineyard ; and through all history 
we hear a Voice from heaven saying, u This is my 
beloved Son, hear Him." Never can the race of man, 
never can the soul of man be nearer to God than Christ 
has brought them: nor since Him hath there been, nor hath 



224 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

there needed to be, one further ray of moral light, one 
brighter gleam of spiritual illumination. Yes ; the last 
Voice from heaven has spoken : be deaf to it, and you 
will hear it indeed no longer — not a whisper of it shall 
stir the air, not a murmur of it echo in the ear ; but 
you will hear no other. Hate that light, and you may 
then conscientiously deny it, for you will cease to see 
it — it will exist to you as little as if you had been born 
blind ; but besides its quiet shining you shall have no 
other. Jesus may become to you a peasant-prophet 
who died in Palestine ; God may become to you dead 
matter and formless law: yet, for all that, the truth 
remains, and it is the blood of Christ that alone 
cleanseth from all sin, and we must all stand before the 
judgment seat of God. But all of you have heard and 
have learnt the truth. A vow was made for you at 
baptism ; that vow was repeated in the sight of God at 
your confirmation: therefore you ought to take the more 
earnest heed to the things which you have heard, lest 
at any time you should drift away from them. 

Drifting away ; — try to fix that word in your minds. 
There is a moral and there is an intellectual drifting 
away of the soul from truth ; and very often the moral 
is the cause of the intellectual, so that a man does not 
know God's doctrine, because he will not do God's will ; 
and very often the moral is the result of the intellec- 
tual, so that, as St. Paul says, he who has become vain 
in his imaginations, and his foolish heart is darkened, 
professing himself to be wise becomes a fool, and giving 
himself up, as did the heathen world, to unclean- 
ness, changes the truth of God into a lie. But it is 
of the moral drifting away from the truth, not of the 
intellectual, that I would speak now. 

Drifting away ; how much there is in that mournful 



xxiii.] DRIFTING AWAY. 225 

word ! If the very picture it involves had not led me 
insensibly into allegory, exactly the same moral truths 
might have been expressed in simplest fact. Is not your 
mortal life that frail shallop, in which yo u must wait 
in the little harbour of Time, till you are summoned to 
that world where the eternal is also the visible ? And 
in that life are there not the three influences, of the 
body, the intellect, the spirit; and the command that 
all three receive, is it not the moral law? And that 
anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, which, if you 
will not tamper with it, or tear it from its hold, will 
grapple you safely to the shore — is it not your con- 
science ? And is not the history of many human lives 
exactly this — by the allurements of the world, or the 
lusts of the flesh, or the wiles of the devil, you are 
tempted to loosen that anchor; to assert a spurious 
freedom ; to disobey the moral law of God : and is it 
not the worst and eldest brother — the flesh, the body, 
the temporal within us — which first is stirred; and 
then the intellect is perverted ; and then, by the joint 
infatuation of the passionate body, and the poor, vain, 
darkened, perverted sophisticated intellect, the spirit 
youngest born of God within us, is encarnalised and 
depraved ; and do we not thus force conscience from its 
anchor-hold, and begin the bad career ? At first con- 
science drags a little ; and the sinner, not yet quite happy 
in his disobedience, might then easily be saved ; but if 
this be neglected — if the last barriers of moral scruple 
be surpassed — if every spiritual instinct within us be 
sedulously silenced — if each faint short effort be suffered 
to become yet shorter and yet more faint ; — oh, then it is 
that we drift and drift and drift, and the shore lessens 
behind us, and the sunset fades from the God-forgetting 
soul, and the false smile vanishes from the treacherous 

M.S. , Q 



226 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm 

temptation, and the smooth surface becomes a sweeping 
current, and strong tide, and roaring sea ! And when I 
say this, am I not tearing a page from ten thousand life 
histories ? from your life history, and yours, and yours ? 
And what remains for these ? One thing only : return, 
repentance — to be won at all hazards, at the cost, if need 
be, of the very life — repentance even through agonies 
and energies— or a certain fearful looking-for, and to 
stand naked, ashamed, guilty, speechless, before the 
just and inevitable bar. 

"Drifting away." He who wrote that expression 
knew something of the human heart ; he knew that the 
soul does not leap at once into absolute apostasy ; he 
knew that the beginning of sin is as the letting out of 
water ; he knew that, as the proverb says, the mother 
of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing ; he knew 
that by almost invisible deflections we arrive at almost 
infinite distances. We read of vessels separated from 
their consorts at evening by a few yards, which yet, 
caught by the stealthy flow of some invisible current, 
have in a single night drifted a hundred miles away. 
And do you ask me " How are you to know whether you 
are drifting away or not ? " — that, as your own hearts 
will tell you, is an idle question. You cannot walk the 
dim borderland between vice and virtue without- 
knowing it. You cannot drift from heedlessness to 
indifference, from indifference to disobedience, from 
disobedience to rebellion, without being well aware of 
it. You cannot be swept along from the thought to the 
wish, from the wish to the word, from the word to the 
act, from the act to the habit, from the willing habit 
to the penal necessity, without being well conscious of 
it. Drifting away from the truths of God and of your 
father to the lies of those false friends who are your 



xxiii.] DRIFTING AWAY. 227 

worst enemies; from home to a hungry and barren 
land; from innocence to a stained and evil life: oh, 
you cannot thus drift from the safe shelter of child- 
hood into the strong currents of youth, into the 
dangerous seas of temptation, into the awful gulf and 
cataract of death, without, at the first stages, being 
only too well and fatally aware of it. There is not one 
of you who does not know whether, with him, at this 
moment, the anchor is holding firm and fast, or whether 
it is dragging, or whether his little boat has already 
rushed over the harbour bar and is in the sea. It is 
only late in the career of impenitence that words of 
warning fall on the ear no longer ; that if the scorner 
hopes it is a hope without an effort, and if he prays it 
is a prayer without a change ; and the twilight becomes 
the evening, and the evening the black, dark night ; and 
grey hairs are upon him, and he knows it not ; and 
"the eye of the soul has grown dull, and the heart 
w T axed fat, and he is least afraid when most in peril." 

And what is the remedy ? It all lies in the one 
word, " Take heed." If you take heed to that which 
you have heard, neither man nor devil can slip the 
hawser or shake the anchor of your soul. How well 
Moses knew this when he bade the Israelites bind God's 
law as a token upon the hand and as frontlets between 
the eyes. How well David knew it when he said, 
'• Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way ? 
even by taking heed thereto, according to Thy Word." 
How well Solomon knew it when he said vie y^\ 
irapappvris — "My son, drift not away from my com- 
mandments ; keep them as the apple of thine eye ; bind 
them upon thy fingers ; write them upon the table of 
thine heart." My brethren, be not deceived. Attention 
to the moral law of God and the awful truths of religion 

Q 2 



228 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

is an act of the will. Show me the boy who is living 
from hand to mouth ; in whom the impressions of holy 
reverence are being worn away ; whose life is frivolous, 
weak, thoughtless; whose nominal prayers are no 
prayers at all ; who kneels daily in this holy place, 
but kneels dull, and mute, and heavy, and with 
wandering, and often guilty, fancies, but never kneels 
to praise and to worship ; who has forgotten the lessons 
which he learnt as a child at his mother's knee, and 
neglected the advice which his father taught him when 
he parted from his home; show me the boy who rose 
this morning late, and sluggish, and prayerless; who 
has spent the time since chapel in aimless idleness, or 
in frivolous gossip, or in reading his trashy novel or his 
sporting newspaper, without one thought of duty, or 
eternity, or God ; without once confessing his sins to 
his Father in heaven, or making holier resolutions for 
the week to come ; — show me this boy, and I will show 
you one who is drifting away. Therefore if you would 
be safe, take heed. You, whose boat is still anchored 
to the shore, since the temptations of boyhood will 
assuredly steal upon your security and assault your 
inexperience, take heed to these words, that you may be 
faithful and watchful to the end. You who are drifting 
away, take heed to them, while there yet is time, as to 
the warning voice of one who calls to you from the 
shore. Let us all take heed to them, not as a subject 
for vain, empty criticism or fool-born jest, but as one 
more message of our God and Father to these soul's of 
ours, to be despised, indeed, and rejected at our pleasure, 
but also at our peril. Oh, set in the midst of so many 
and great dangers, rarely or never do we take heed 
enough. Therefore, in the repeated language of Holy 
Scripture, I say to you, to all : Take heed, let the fear 



xxiil] DRIFTING A WA Y. 229 

of the Lord be on you. To the younger : take heed, 
regard not iniquity; take heed that no man deceive 
you. To the elder : take heed that ye despise not one 
of these little ones ; take heed what thou doest. To the 
abler and more advanced : take heed that the light in 
you be not darkness; take heed of an evil heart of 
unbelief. To all — to every one of you : take heed how 
ye hear ; take heed of the things you have heard, lest 
perchance you drift away from them. 

September i, 1874. 



SEEMON XXIV. 
THE HISTORY AND HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 

, Ps. cxxii. 8. 
" For my brethren and companions' sake, T will wish thee prosperity. 

£OOd. 



Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do thee 



o 



Last Sunday I spoke to you of the temple of God in 
a Christian school, and tried to show you that it must 
be built on the broad foundation of truth, and that we, 
if we would be builders therein, must be true to our- 
selves, true to one another, true to God. It seems no 
unnatural sequel to such a subject if to-day I speak to 
you about our school itself. You will pardon me if, 
in the inadequate attempt to say even a little of what 
might be said on such a theme, I unwillingly detain you 
a moment longer than usual. I am persuaded you will 
not think the topic useless. Anything that' raises us to 
the full consciousness that we are not our own, but 
members one of another — anything that deepens in us 
the conviction that God has placed us in this His world 
not to seek our own pleasure, or think our own thoughts, 
or speak our own words, but to do His work in our own 
hearts, and for our fellow-men — this must be good for 
us. Many a sin and many a baseness will be destroyed 
or weakened if we can thus kill within us the perverted 
love of self. Since, then, on Tuesday next we keep by 



serm. xxiv.] THE HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 231 

a religious service that commemoration day which 
reminds us that Marlborough College has now, for 
thirty-one years, taken its place among the Public 
Schools of England, let us to-day look backwards and 
forwards — backward to its past history, forward to its 
future hopes — in order that we may love our school 
still better, and the more heartily feel, and more 
vigorously follow our path of duty in its present 
circumstances. 

I. I need not do more than remind you of the 
associations which surround us in the place where 
our College stands, — yet even they have their deep 
significance. That Druidic mound which faces our 
chapel door is but one of the links which associate 
us with the past. Strange but humbling fact, that 
the most permanent memorial which man can rear is 
just a heap of the soil on which he treads ! In that 
mound we have the most ancient monument in the 
possession of any English school. Once the tumulus 
of some great British priest or chieftain, it is the relic 
of a worship of which the very deities are forgotten, 
At Eome the stupendous ruins of the Colosseum strike 
us with wonder ; but that mound was reared before one 
stone of the Colosseum had been laid — before the 
herald angels sang from the midnight sky — before, over 
the fields of Palestine walked those blessed feet, which 

"Eighteen hundred years ago were nailed 
For our salvation to the bitter cross." 

it stood, in all probability as now r it stands. And thus 
for two millenniums has it been the silent witness of 
that sacred light by which God "shows all things in the 
slow history of their ripening." When it was reared 
England was a country of waste and morass and moor, 
like Labrador; wolves howled in her forests, wild boars 



232 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

wallowed in her fens. Then came the "drums and 
tramplings " of successive conquests. Eoman discipline 
subjugated barbarous disunion ; Saxon, and Dane, and 
Norman each triumphed in turn over the enervation 
of their predecessors. Then our mound became the 
keep of a Norman castle. In the days of the Plan- 
tagenets English princes lived on it, and English kings 
have dated their charters from it. Through the long 
lines of Lancaster, and York, and Tudor, and Stuart, it 
continued. In the civil wars its castle was dismantled. 
Then these grounds became the home of a noble English 
family, and in the reign of Charles II. our old house 
was built by the most famous architect of his age. 
How in those days it became familiar to poets, nobles, 
and statesmen — how then it became one of the most 
famous inns in England, and, as a resting-place between 
London and the West, was visited by many of England's 
greatest worthies, and among others by the most splendid 
and powerful of her Prime Ministers — you may read 
elsewhere. Then came that change which makes it so 
memorable to us. Thirty-one years ago, on August 25, 
1843, the first Marlburians walked with considering 
footsteps about the place which was to be the new 
home of their boyhood, and to which, as time passed 
on, some of their sons were to follow them. Some of 
you who sit on these benches to-day are sons of some 
of those 200 who, thirty-one years ago, first entered this 
place as Marlborough boys ; and of their traditions, 
of their influences, of their characters, of the motives 
brought to bear upon them, of the manner in which 
they yielded to those motives — so far-reaching are the 
pulsations of our moral life — all of you are the heirs. 
The sound of their boyish laughter, the echo of their 
happy voices has died away, and many of them have 



xxiv.] THE HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 233 

passed away from the life of earth. In a body so large 
as this many die as the years pass on. I remember the 
first boy who ever entered my room as a pupil here 
nearly twenty years ago. He lies now under the deep 
sea-wave. I remember the first head of my form here 
— that memorial window records his character. Yes, we 
die ; but not the effect of our deeds. All other sounds 



i ' Die in yon rich sky, 
They faint in hill and field or river ; 
Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
And live for ever and ever." 



If you be living weak, miserable, effeminate lives, then 
let it be a warning and an awful thought ; if you are 
living true, manly, righteous lives, let it be an ennobling, 
an inspiring thought, that your lives too will live, in 
their moral echoes, for coming generations of Marl- 
borough boys. 

II. And another fact reminds us that these thirty-one 
years, which are a generation of human life, have passed 
over this young school. It is that our first founders, 
our first benefactors, those who first worked, and toiled, 
and thought for us, are fast passing away. A wise 
impulse in this age, as in the days of Elizabeth, led to 
the foundation of many new schools. After the kmg 
and dreary slumber of a corrupt and atheist century, 
waked by the trumpet voices of Wesley and Whitfield, 
the clergy were beginning to shake off their apathy, and 
in every parish of England to practise those lives of 
stern self-denial and honoured poverty of which they 
now set so happy an example. There was a widespread 
desire to help them in furnishing their sons with an 
education as good as that of the proudest noble in the 
land. It was while that thought was in many minds 



234 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

that a clergyman, afterwards Dean of Manchester, 1 whose 
bust is in the hall, was walking about these grounds with 
a gentleman 2 who then resided here; and, struck with 
the prospect of the river, the valley, the forest, the downs, 
and with the quiet, the green fields, the healthy air of the 
place, he exclaimed, " What an excellent site this would 
be for a great-school ! " Those words, which we may well 
regard as a Bath K61 — a providential voice — led to the 
foundation of Marlborough College, He enlisted others 
w T ho felt an interest in the same cause. Some were men 
of eminence, but most of them were simple English 
gentlemen, who with great zeal and self-denial carried 
out their noble purpose. That clergyman died last 
year ; — the grandsons of the gentleman to whom he 
spoke, and of another, 3 who also died last year full of 
years and honours, and who has often been called the 
father of the College, are sitting among you now ; 
and he to whose well-judged munificence you owe the 
inestimable boon of the Adderley Library, 4 which adds 
so much to your advantages, — the most generous and 
the most faithful of all the friends of the College, — he 
too lies on the bed of sickness. And as I speak I recall 
the names of others, and younger men, who could not 
enrich Marlborough with their worldly goods— because 
they had them not — but who, working here as earnest, 
and faithful, and zealous masters, or living here as high- 
minded, and pure, and noble boys, enriched it with the 
more golden legacy of manly memories and Christian 
lives. I recall the names of some in past days and some 
in these — of Edward Lawford Brown, and Thomas Harris 
Burn, and Edward Colquhoun Boyle, and Herbert 
Edward Booth, and Walter Ernest Congreve — who being 

1 Dean Bowers. 3 Christopher Hodgson, Esq. 

2 Mr. Halcomb. 4 F. Alleyne McGeachy, Esq. 



xxiv.] THE HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 235 

dead, yet speak, and who have not lived in vain. Yes, year 
by year the old generous benefactors, the old munificent 
friends, the old self-denying labourers for Marlborough 
College are fast passing away, and leaving us only 
the heritage of those good deeds which cannot die. 
We need others to take their places ; and I trust that, 
by God's blessing, we shall find them in her sons. We 
shall find them, I trust, in some of you. You will arise 
and call her blessed. You will hand on undimned to 
others the lighted torch of bright enthusiasm and 
honourable tradition, which was put into your hands, 
You will continue and extend for others the blessings 
from which you yourselves have gained. Some of you, 
when you grow up, may become rich and prosperous 
men. If you do, remember that in a greedy age you 
were taught at your school, as a lesson drawn from 
the good deeds of its founders, that, as there is nothing 
more absolutely vulgar and despicable than selfish and 
grasping riches, so you can adopt no surer means of 
ennobling your wealth, and thereby ennobling your own 
souls, than by aiding those institutions which have 
been founded for the welfare of mankind. And for a 
wealthy man I cannot think of any means of using 
gold more fruitful in usefulness, more likely to preserve 
an honoured memory, than to support sound learning 
and religious education by becoming the benefactor of 
some great school. 

The College then was founded ; and they who had 
laboured and given their substance for it, won thereby 
a grace and a blessing which nothing else could have 
given them. 

But how did their work prosper ? At first not well. 
Let us bear in mind that in those days it was a great 
and wholly new experiment : and some hundreds of 



236 IN THE DAYS OF TRY YOUTH. [rerm. 

boys, all strangers to one another, collected in one 
building — without a past, without unity, without tradi- 
tions — fell at first into many rough and discreditable ways, 
which seemed likely at one time to make the name of 
Marlburian a byeword and a hissing. It must have 
been a bitter thing for those who then worked for our 
school to bear ; but the}' who sow faithfully, though it 
be in tears, shall reap in joy. Yes, laborare et orare 
were (as in one way or other they always are) success- 
ful ; and the first master of Marlborough 1 has lived to 
see that he was doing a work which, though different 
from that achieved by others, has yet been granted to 
few. For to those days of trial, and greatly to his work, 
we owe that organisation which has since been imitated 
in its minutest particulars by later schools. And what 
was still wanting it was granted to his successor to achieve. 
It is something for every Marlborough boy to know 
that when he looks at that portrait of Bishop Cotton 
which adorns our hall, he is looking at the likeness of 
one of the best men whom this generation has produced. 
It was God's special blessing to a new school- that sent 
him here. He was not great as the world counts great- 
ness. When he came here he was but little known 
beyond a narrow circle of attached friends. Nor was it 
at once either in numbers, or in intellectual successes, or 
in improved finances, t'hat Marlborough began to flourish. 
Yet, undoubtedly, it was Bishop Cotton who saved the 
school. He was here but six years ; and great as was 
his work as Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of 
India, before that disastrous fall into the waters of the 

1 The Rev. Matthew Henry Wilkinson, D.JX, Prebendary of Salis- 
bury and Vicar of Melksham. [Obiit March 4, 1876.] As a slight 
memorial to the name of a good man, to whom scant justice has been 
but tardily rendered, I venture to append to this sermon some lines 
which I wrote while returning from his funeraL 



xxiv.] THE HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 237 

Indian river after which he was seen no more, it is yet 
with this place that his name will be most identified. 
It was my own deep happiness in those days to know 
him, to love him, to work with him, and in daily walks 
and intercourse with him, as afterwards by letters, until 
he died, to learn what manner of man he was. And 
how did he save Marlborough, when it might any day 
have disappeared, unhonoured and unregretted, from its 
place among the public schools of England ? My 
brethren, it is well for you to know — it is a valuable 
lesson for anyone to know : it was not by the genius of 
the thinker ; it was not by the brilliancy of the scholar ; 
it was not by that burning enthusiasm, and personal 
ascendency with which Arnold of Rugby had done his 
work. Such gifts were not his ; but it was by those 
fruits of the Spirit which are in the reach of all, and by 
that heavenly grace which is given in even larger mea- 
sure to them that seek it. The lesson of his life for you 
and me is that it is a thing dearer and better in God's 
sight, and more fruitful to our fellow-men, to be entrusted 
with but one talent, and to use it faithfully than to have 
a hundred, and use them ill. A calm hopefulness, a 
cheerful simplicity, an exquisite equanimity of temper, 
a humility which made him a learner to the very end, 
a genuine, self-denying love for Marlborough, and for 
those boys w-hom God had here entrusted to his charge — 
these were what gave to his life that mysterious power 
which is always granted to the unselfish purpose and the 
single eye. And this was the type of character — God 
grant that it may long be stamped upon some of the 
sons whom this school shall train ! — which he produced 
among his pupils and his colleagues. I shall never 
forget the spectacle which the Marlborough of that day 
presented. Something was due, no doubt, to the fact 



238 . IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

that it was a day of adversity, which often brings out all 
that is noblest and sweetest in human lives. But cer- 
tainly the few here present who remember that time 
will bear me witness that it taught us all a priceless 
lesson. We all felt that it was a struggle, first, whether 
Marlborough College should live at all, next, whether it 
should live in honour or obscurity. We won no great 
successes; we were beaten in every game; there was 
much that was mean in our surroundings — much that 
was trying in our arrangements — much that was still 
coarse, and rough,, and unintellectual in the habits of 
the place. And yet how we all loved it ! How boys and 
masters alike worked for it ! What a pride they felt even 
in its humility ! what a thrill of delight we all felt when 
one succeeded ! How ready they were, some of them, even 
to the permanent surrender of better prospects, to serve 
Marlborough and work for her. And verily they 
have their reward ; they have their reward, that is, if 
the highest price which life can offer is clearly to see 
what is best, and resolutely to do it. And is there 
anything better than this ? Life is not the mere living. 
It is worship — it is the surrender of the soul to God, 
and the power to see the face of God ; and it is service 
— it is to feel that when we die, whether praised or 
blamed, whether appreciated or misinterpreted, whether 
honoured or ignored, whether wealthy or destitute — we 
have done something to make the world we came to 
better and happier — we have tried to cast upon the 
waters some seeds which, long after we are dead, may 
still bring forth their flowers of Paradise. The seed 
dies, but the harvest lives. Sacrifice is always fruitful, 
and there is nothing fruitful else. Try, then, to fix in 
your hearts one lesson, to register in your prayers one 
vow, this morning — the lesson that life consisteth not 



xxiv.] THE HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 229 

in the abundance of things that we possess, but in the 
good and honest work we do — the vow that you, too, 
will live, not to lade your soul with the thick clay of 
earthly riches — not to daub your lives with the un- 
tempered mortar of human praise — not to waste your 
labours on those gains of the wilderness, which can 
neither satisfy the soul's hunger nor quench its thirst ; 
but to live for what is best and greatest, to take Christ 
for your Captain, and do your duty to all the world. 
For those efforts succeeded, as such efforts always 
will ; they raised Marlborough from adversity. Bishop 
Cotton was summoned to other work ; but under a suc- 
cessor, whom many of you still love and remember — 
a pupil of Arnold, as Bishop Cotton had been his friend 
and colleague — the name of Marlborough rose into 
brilliant reputation. 1 In spite of its youth, in spite of 
its struggles, in spite of the fact that it had neither 
royal founder nor rich foundation, it took its place 
decidedly, and unless you, its sons, degenerate, took its 
place permanently among the leading schools of Eng- 
land, striving, not unsuccessfully, to oe second to none 
in the training it could offer, in the distinctions it could 
win, in the affection it could inspire, in the honour 
it could reflect. This prosperity you inherit ; but, my 
brethren, do not lose sight of that fact — which all 
history has shown so forcibly — that the day of prosperity 
is the day also of peril. The very qualities which lead 
to glory and eminence are but too apt, when they have 
produced it, to merge into the weakness, the luxury, the 
effeminacy, the neglect, by which it is as inevitably 
undermined. It has been said of nations, and it is no 
less true of schools, that " in their perplexities, in their 

1 The Kev. G. G. Bradley, D.D., Master of University College, 
Oxford. 



240 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

struggles for existence, their infancy, their impotence, 
and even their disorganization, they have higher hopes 
and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the 
serious mind ; out of the salvation, the grateful heart ; 
out of the endurance, the fortitude ; out of the deliver- 
ance, the faith. But when the violent and external 
sources of suffering cease, worse evils seem arising out 
of their rest — evils that vex less, but mortify more — 
that suck the blood, though they do not shed it, and 
ossify the heart, though they do not torture it." Yes, in 
every prosperous institution there is danger that " ener- 
vation may succed to rest, apathy to patience, and the 
noise of jesting words, and the foulness of dark thoughts, 
to the earnest purity of the girded loin and the burning 
lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry 
wind, though a heavenly sunshine : the iris colours its 
agitation — the frost fixes on its repose. Let us beware 
that our rest becomes not the rest of stones, which, so 
long as they are torrent-tost and thunder-riven, main- 
tain their majesty, but when the stream is silent and 
the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover and the lichen 
to feed on them, and are ploughed down into the dust." 
To sum up, then, in one last word — it was the duty of 
others to found, it is ours to build on their foundation ; 
of others to rescue Marlborough from adversity, it is 
ours to preserve and to ennoble her prosperity ; of others 
to mould our institutions, it is ours to see that those 
institutions, year by year, train every grace and virtue 
of boyhood into the strength of Christian manhood, 
and send forth, in the high service of God and man, 
Christian scholars and Christian gentlemen to be the 
hope and glory of our land. Love your school with an 
unselfish and loyal devotion. Feel how disgraceful it 
would be to wound, by worthlessness or wickedness, the 



xxiv.l THE HOPES OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL. 241 

breast of that mother who thus nnrses your early years. 
If you work for yourselves, feel it a yet higher thing 
to work for her honour ; covet for Marlborough College 
a high career and a more and more distinguished name ; 
covet for her yet more earnestly the best gifts of a pure 
and manly tradition, a vigorous and happy life. To her, 
and not to another, is your faithful allegiance, your 
chivalrous devotion due. Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna. 
You are not at a tutor's to be crammed, as isolated 
units, for some purely selfish competition : from the 
necessarily vulgarising influences of such an absorption 
in a merely personal end you are saved by the vigorous 
and varied life of an English public school, which, if a 
boy's heart be not quite eaten out by selfishness, is 
enough, one would think, to ennoble the meanest nature 
with the thought that his life does not affect himself 
alone. Throw a stone into a still lake, and you will 
see the rings of its ruffled surface widen and widen till 
they die away upon the farther shore : even so, in the 
concentric circles of their ever- widening influences, do 
the lives of every one of you leave their trace in the 
common life of your companions. From this school 
many an old Marlburian has gone forth, year by year, 
not only with well-earned laurels, which they have 
won for us by manly self-denial and diligent resolve • 
but — what is better still — carrying with them into the 
world's life high lessons which they have learnt in this 
place — lessons of earnest purpose, of unresting diligence, 
of childlike and gentlest modesty. It is these who, by 
the grace of God, have created for Marlborough a not 
ignoble past. Marlborough boys of to-day— you whom 
God has placed here for the most intellectually difficult, 
the most morally important years of all your lives — 
sons of Marlborough College, all of you, and, most of all, 

M.S. R 



242 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xxiv. 

you who will kneel with us in Holy Communion at the 
Supper of our Lord — determine, in God's name, that 
you too will needfully follow the very best and truest of 
those who have gone before you in the footsteps of our 
Master Christ ; vow that, like them, as the worthy sons 
of a common mother, you will strive here to be profit- 
able members of the Church and Commonwealth, that 
with them you may partake hereafter of the immortal 
glories of the Eesurrection. 

September 27, 1874. 

IN MEMOBJAM M. M. WILKINSON, D.D. 
First Master of Marlborough College. Died March 4, 1876. 

Aye, they are o'er — his pain and his endeavour, 
Our scant acknowledgment, and frequent wrong ; 

Hushed are aU tones of praise or blame for ever, 
For those who listen to the angels' song. 

He sowed the seed with sorrow and with weeping, 
Barely he saw green blade or tender leaves ; 

Yet in meek faith, uneuvious of the reaping, 

Blessed the glad gatherers of the golden sheaves. 

But we, — when reapers unto reapers calling 
Tell the rich harvest of the grain they bring, — 

Shall we forget how snow and sleet were falling 
On those tired toilers of the bitter spring ? 

And yet of him nor word nor line remaineth, 
Picture nor bust, his work and worth to tell ; 

And though nor he nor any friend complaineth, 
We ask in sadness — 'Marlborough, is it well V 

Enough ! he murmured not ! — in earthly races 

To winners only do the heralds call ; 
But oh ! in yonder high and holy places 

Success is nothing, and the work is all. 

So — since ye will it — here be unrecorded 

The work he fashioned and the path he trod ; 

Here, but in Heaven each kind heart is rewarded, 
Each true name written in the books of God ! 

F. W. F 



SERMON XXV 

TEE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING FEOM 
CONSTANT ASSOILMENT. 

Johx xiii. 10. 

" He that is washed needeth not save to wash, his feet, but is clean 
every whit : and ye are clean, but not all. " 

I. It was at the Last Supper of the Lord. Jesus and 
His apostles had taken, for the last time, the familiar 
walk from Bethany to Jerusalem, and had entered the 
upper chamber for their final gathering on earth. Even 
at that supreme moment the petty jealousies of life had 
not been exorcised, and the twelve had had an unseemly 
dispute which of them should be greatest. Jesus 
listened in pained silence, and wishing to teach them 
a lesson infinitely more significant and more touching 
than any rebuke, knowing that His hour was come to 
depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved 
His own, He loved them unto the end. They had 
walked along the hot and dusty road over the shoulder 
of Olivet ; on entering the chamber they had indeed 
taken off their sandals and left them at the door ; but 
still the dust of their journey was on their unsandalled 
feet. To have their feet bathed before the meal was 
cooling, cleanly, and refreshing ; but in their little 
mutual jealousies, no one had offered to perform the 
menial office. And therefore, when supper was ready — 

R 2 



244 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

for so the words ought to be rendered, — Jesus, as the 
scene in all its minute details had impressed itself on 
the memory of the Evangelist of love, rose in perfect 
silence, stripped off His upper garment and tunic, took 
a towel, girt it round His waist, poured water into a 
bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe 
them with the towel wherewith He was girded. The 
example of so infinite a humility kept them dumb with 
deep shame, until Jesus came to Peter ; but the warm- 
hearted, eager apostle starts back with almost indignant 
surprise. " Lord," he exclaims with his usual irrepres- 
sible emotion, "Dost Thou mean to wash my feet?" 
Thou the Son of God, the King of Israel, — Thou that 
hast the words of eternal life, — Thou who earnest forth 
from God, and goest to God, perform a slave's office for 
Peter's feet? It is the old strange mixture of self- 
conceit and self-disgust, — the self-conceit of old, which 
under the shadow of Hermon had called upon him so 
stern a rebuke when he had said " That be far from Thee, 
Lord ; this shall not be unto Thee ;" the self-disgust 
which of old, on the Lake of Galilee, had flung him to 
his knees with that great cry wrung from his yearning 
heart, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, oh Lord." 
" What I do," said Jesus — and His words apply to all 
our mortal life, in which the lamp of faith can alone 
fling a little ring of illumination amid the encircling 
gloom — " What I do thou knowest not now, but thou 
shalt know hereafter." Unconvinced, he impetuously 
cries out, " Never, never, till the end of time shalt Thou 
wash my feet." " If I wash thee not," said Jesus gently, 
revealing to him the profound significance of the act, 
iC thou hast no part in Me." " Little as thou mayest 
understand it, yet it is I, even I, who must wash thy 
feet, and no other. Thou canst not do it thyself. I 



axv.] THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING. 245 

alone can do it. Eeject it indeed thou canst, for it 
depends on thine own will. I wash no man who prefers 
his stain. But to reject My cleansing is to reject Me. 
Therefore if I wash thee not, thou hast no part in Me." 
Then the deeper meaning of it all flashes in upon the 
conviction of the passionate apostle. " No part in 
Thee ! oh forbid it, Heaven ! Lord, not my feet only, but 
also my hands and my head." " Purge me with hyssop, 
and I shall be clean ; wash me, and I shall be whiter 
than snow." But no : once more he is too impetuous ; 
once more he has failed to catch the meaning of Christ. 
This total washing was not needed. The spiritual 
baptism for him was over. In that laver of regeneration 
he had been already dipped. Nothing more was 
needed than the daily cleansing from minor and freshly- 
contracted stains. The heart, the inward being of the 
disciples — these w 7 ere already washed, were cleansed, 
were sanctified ; but the feet, soiled with the clinging 
dust of the daily walk, these must be ever cleansed in 
daily renovation. " Jesus saith to him, He that hath 
been bathed (6 XeXov/jiivos) needeth not but to wash his 
feet." And so, in His deep humility, in His abounding 
love, the Saviour washed His disciples' feet ; washed — 
and surely there is something awful in thinking of it 
— bent over, with His sacred head, — touched with the 
tenderness of His cleansing hands, — even those feet 
of the traitor, which the foul dust of their murderous 
mission was soiling still. 

II. Even from this brief explanation you will see at 
once that what Jesus did was an acted parable of deep 
and many-sided significance. Its easier and more 
obvious meanings — those which Jesus afterwards ex- 
plained — were the unfeigned humility needed from all 
who would come to His sacred ordinance, and that duty 



246 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



of mutual love and helpfulness which makes of that 
ordinance a true communion. " If I, your Lord and 
Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash 
one another's feet/' Instead of these miserable heart- 
burnings and jealousies, ye, who are My children, love 
one another ; do for one another all gentle acts of kindly 
courtesy ; above all, wash one another's feet by that best, 
sweetest, kindliest service of all, which is that each 
should help his friend or his brother to draw daily a 
little nearer to God — to triumph daily a little more over 
human temptations and human infirmities — to leave the 
broad, dusty, trodden roads of iniquity and toil up the 
narrow, rocky, up-hillward path, which niay make the 
feet bleed, but defiles them not, — even until that day, 
when, 

" Envy and calumny and hate and pain, 
And that unrest by men miscalled delight, 
Can touch us not, nor torture us again," 

because at last 

" From the contagion of the world's slow stain 
We are secure, and then can never mourn 
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain." 

But not dwelling now on these more obvious lessons 
of personal humility and mutual charity, as essentials 
for the Lord's Supper, and indeed for every means of 
grace, let us rather for a few moments think on the 
deeper spiritual significance of this washing of the feet 
by Christ, as pointing to our need, all through life, of 
the daily renewal of daily purifying grace. 

III. To whom does it apply ? 

" Ye are clean," said Jesus, " but not all." And if 
this were true even of the chosen twelve, must it 
not, alas ! be true also of every Christian congregation ? 



xx v.] THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING. 247 

We have all indeed been baptised, all bathed in that 
laver of regeneration ; but have all kept the white 
robe of their "baptismal innocence? Ten, thirteen, 
fifteen, eighteen years ago, have the parents of you 
all stood, with some who loved them, at the holy 
font, in many a church near and far away, in Eng- 
land or beyond the sea, and while yet you smiled 
in unconscious infancy, you were admitted into the 
fold of Christ's Church, and signed w T ith the sign of the 
cross in token that hereafter you should not be ashamed 
to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and man- 
fully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, 
and the devil, and continue Christ's faithful soldier 
and servant unto your life's end. Many at that time 
were their hopes and prayers that their child might 
lead the rest of his life according to this beginning ; 
and in old days it was customary to hang up the 
wdiite robe — the chrisom robe of baptism— in silent 
memorial to each soul of the holiness which becomes 
Christ's house for ever. But that baptismal vow, have 
you all kept it ? That white robe, has it received no fatal 
stain ? Have you all fought, and manfully, under that 
banner ? You have entered upon various paths of life. 
You have all passed from the sacred shadow of home 
to the society of other boys, congregated, it may be, from 
very different homes, and subjected, it may be, to very 
different influences. You have met with temptations. 
You have become familiar — =some alas ! how early — 
with the existence of evil, of disbelief, of disobedience, 
of dishonour, of wicked words, of corrupt commu- 
nications. Into these temptations have none fallen, — 
first wilfully, then willingly, then greedily ? — learnt to 
despise God's sabbaths, learnt not to mind grieving their 
parents, learnt to take God's name in vain, learnt to 



248 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

indulge in evil thoughts, learnt to hate and annoy their 
fellows, learnt to say that which is not true, and learnt 
to desire that which is not right ; and, which is a yet 
deeper downward step, not only to do these things 
themselves, but to promote these things in others, and 
to have pleasure in those that do them ? And if so, 
is it not true even of this young congregation — "Ye 
are clean, but not all ? " And if so, what shall we say to 
these ? Bathed indeed again they cannot be. Baptism, 
confirmation, which is the completion of baptism, can 
be but once ; but the renewal by repentance of the 
grace of baptism, yes ! that can be for all time. For 
those who are not clean, who are bad boys and not 
good — servants and agents of the devil, not of God — for 
these there is no earthly remedy; their brother cannot 
save their souls, or pay their debt. Abana and Pharpar, 
rivers of Damascus, will not wash away their guilt ; but 
there is a spiritual Jordan, wherein they may w r ash and 
be clean; there is a fountain opened for all sin and 
for all uncleanness. Only they must come to it of their 
own free will. God promises these forgiveness. He 
cannot promise them the repentance on which forgive- 
ness alone depends : that must come from within ; and 
whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, 
whether they will turn and repent, or whether they 
will wander farther and farther, and wax worse and 
worse — there is for them but one voice, and it cries : 
" Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your 
doings from before Mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn 
to do well." 

IV. But our Lord said: "He that is washed needeth 
not save to wash his feet, " and " Ye are clean/' And 
surely this is true of the vast majority of you. Surely 
the state I have described can be the state, if of any, 



xxv.] THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING. 249 

yet only of a very few. Is not the condition of most of 
you rather this ? Ton have indeed sinned ; you have 
gone astray and done wickedly ; you have sometimes 
offended w 7 ith your tongue ; the thoughts of your heart 
are sometimes very evil ; you are but too conscious of 
many weaknesses, many transgressions. You know 
that you are not yet what you should be, what you 
might be, what you yet hope to be. But, while you 
acknowledge all this, you acknowledge it with shame 
and penitence. Your heart, though unfaithful, is not 
hard ; your will, though biassed, is not corrupt ; your 
rebellion, though manifest, is not absolute. You have 
not yet forgotten God, you have not yet ceased to 
struggle ; you yet bow your head and kneel upon your 
knees and pray in sorrow and in sincerity to the Father 
whose love you often grieve. Careless you have been, 
cowardly, all but mutinous, but never an open traitor ; 
falls you have had, disgraces, weaknesses, but you have 
never quite deserted your ranks, never been found 
fighting among the enemies of God. Though not good, 
you are at least trying to be good ; though you have not 
done good, you have wished to do it, and at lea& you 
have not got the blood of others on your soul. Well, 
my brethren, this is a very common state ; and to you 
I say, that if you be sincere, if you be growing better, be 
it even but a little better, if, though not yet victorious, 
you are beginning to gain ground, even a little in an 
honest struggle against sin, then be assured of this, 
" God will not break the bruised reed, or quench the 
smoking flax." Come to Christ your Saviour, come 
with humble penitence, come with honest purpose, and 
gently, even as He longeth to do, will he w T ash each 
stain from those weak and wandering feet ; he will 
cleanse from your repentant souls this daily assoilment 



250 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of daily but -unwilling sin ; he will strengthen you to 
contract it less and less as years go by. 

V. Only if, indeed, you be sincere you will not fail 
to recognise the mercy, the necessity of this daily 
cleansing. Alas ! we may all sin, and we do sin, from 
human infirmity, and because we do not, as we might, 
seek strength where it can be found ; but a little sin 
ceases to be little if, knowing it to be a sin, we yet 
think it little. Are these sins light, are they little ? 
Consider against whom they are committed : against 
God ; consider by whom they are committed : by you, a 
redeemed, a created, an adopted child of God — and you 
will not think them little. Weigh them, not with the 
false weights of self-deception, but in the unerring 
balance of the sanctuary, and you will not think them 
light. We walk in a muddy world, and Satan will not 
suffer even the saints of God to reach heaven with 
stainless feet ; but as the feet, even of apostles, must be 
washed before they could sit at the Supper of the Lord, 
so must every stain be constantly washed from our souls 
before we are in any way fit to come into the presence of 
God. If we do not repent of these sins, if we defend 
or excuse them, if we try to cheat God and to cheat 
ourselves by making only a sham effort to get rid of 
them, that is like saying " Never shalt Thou wash my 
feet ; " and then to us the answer will be still the same. 
" If I wash thee not, thou hast no part in Me/' 

a. For only think, if we do not seek this constant 
repentance, this constant purification, if, habitually, even 
in what we dare to think light things, we go wrong, 
and make no use of God's appointed means of grace to 
get rid of these daily sins, how vast, how terrible in their 
aggregate do they become ! Walk into the forest and 
learn this lesson from the falling autumn leaves. Dead 



xxv.] THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING. 251 



leaves fall one "by one : how small, how light a thing is 
a dead leaf. But when they lie together in putrescent 
multitudes, how dense, how miry do the forest paths 
become ! " Si ea non times" says St. Augustine, " quando 
'ponder as, time saltern quando annuneras" — if thou 
fearest not when thou weighest them, at least fear 
them when thou numherest them ; and " Si non nocent 
ut fidmine, nocent saltern ut grandine" — if they lay not 
waste the vineyard of the soul like the single thunder- 
bolt, they lay it waste, no less terribly, like the many 
hailstones. 

/3. And, then, consider too that however little such 
sins may seem, they always, inevitably, if unrepented of, 
lead to great ones. Does not every sinner begin with 
little sins ? Was not every furious tempest which has 
battered and drowned the soul in destruction and 
perdition, — was it not once a little cloud no bigger 
than a man's hand ? 

7. And consider, lastly, that God will have no reserves. 
He says, " Son, give Me thine heart ;" and less than the 
whole heart He cannot and will not have. He does not 
say " Give Me thine heart, but one dark corner thereof 
thou mayest hide away from My light, and there thou 
mayest keep some secret idol to be worshipped with 
unhallowed incense and strange fires." He says, " Thou 
shalt," and " Thou shalt not,"— not " obey Me in this, 
and then in some other thing thou mayest disobey." 
Fared it well with Ananias and Sapphira when they 
kept back part of the price ? Oh ! how many men 
would be Christians if God would make but one ex- 
ception in their favour, give them one indulgence, 
forgive them the retention of one bosom sin. 

Ah, no ! God would have none of His awful holiness, 
the moral law would have none of its unspeakable 



252 IN THE DAYS OF TRY YOUTH. [serm. 

majesty, if this might be; and what God says is not 
this, but rather is " Pluck up the roots of bitterness. 
Make no truce with Canaan. Cut off the right hand ; 
pluck out the right eye." 

VI. I dwell on all this because I do so feel the import- 
ance, and want all of you to feel the importance of the 
lesson that a state of sin — of willing, of constant, of 
deadly, of habitual sin — is not, cannot be a state of grace. 
The one thing which is insisted on in the Mosaic law 
of sacrifice is that the victims offered at God's altar 
must be faultless victims — victims without blemish, 
and without spot. The ancients, sometimes when they 
offered to Jupiter a victim which was not quite white, 
would chalk over its coloured spots, and so try to pass 
it off as white, and, as it were, cheat their gods into an 
acceptance of that which was imperfect. But think 
you that the Allseeing God will thus be cheated into 
the acceptance of a soul of which the voluntary, the 
self-contracted stains are but smeared over and hidden 
under the white chalk of self-deception, of hypocrisy ? 
iSTay ; but rather take that soul to Him all stained as it 
is, and ask Him to wash away its stains, and accept its 
wretchedness for the Great High Priest's sake, and to 
wash it white in His precious blood. This He will 
accept ; this He will do ; this fitness — if you pray for 
it with all your heart — He will give you. 

Either praying — if only it be sincere praying — " will 
make us leave off sinning, or sinning will make us 
leave off praying." Either love of self will make us 
forget God, or love of God will make us forget self. 
But neither prayer, nor the Holy Communion is a 
charm ; neither will benefit us — any more than they 
benefited the traitor Judas — if they be not approached 
in the right spirit under the right conditions. But if 



xxv.] THE NEED OF CONSTANT CLEANSING. 253 

they are, how high, how infinite a blessing ! Then they 
will tell on your daily life. These chapel services at 
which all, even the youngest of us, dai/y kneel — these 
Holy Communions, of which all who have reached the 
more difficult years of life are privileged to partake — 
will send us on our way refreshed, rejoicing. After 
each of them, if you have an enemy, you will at once 
forgive him in your heart, and try to be reconciled with 
him in your life ; if you know of one immoral boy who 
is doing mischief to others, and above all to his juniors, 
you will denounce him, make him tremble, check his bad 
career ; if you have one bad companion, you will amend 
him or cast him off; if you have left one duty shame- 
fully neglected, you will go and do it ; if you have fallen 
constantly into one particular sin, you will nerve the 
whole force of your conscience to resist it. Thus will 
you go from strength to strength; these will be the 
vows which you will pay to the Most Highest ; thus 
will you wash your hands in innocency, and so come to 
God's altar ; thus will you offer from your inmost heart 
that prayer which many a time has been offered in deep 
sincerity and penitence by many a Marlborough boy 
— many still living, some who are among the dead — 
before you; 

' Then, gracious Lord, prepare 
Our souls for that dread day ; 
wash us in Thy precious blood, 
And take our sins away." 

November 5, 187-L 



SERMON XXVI. 

SOBEBMINBEDNESS. 

Tit. ii. 6. 
" Young men likewise exhort to be sober minded." 






So wrote St. Paul to Titus, the Bishop of Crete. The 
one thing which he most wished to impress upon the 
youthful members of his diocese was sobriety of mind. 
Let us herein follow his guidance ; and though the 
subject is too large to be treated otherwise than frag- 
mentarily and slightly, — though to a stranger, speaking 
among you solely out of respect to the wish of others, 1 
many ways of treating it are precluded,— yet, since "great 
is the effort, great, and not so easy as it seems, to be 
good, and not bad," let us pray to God, to Him who can 
make even the grains of sand a barrier against the 
raging of the sea, that even a thing so poor and weak 
as a single sermon may, in its small measure, help us 
in the difficult daily strife to abhor that which is evil, 
to do that which is good. 

But what is this ccocjzpoavvr), this sobermindedness to 
which you are thus exhorted ? The word, as some of you 
may know, is one of the most suggestive in an almost 
perfect language. It' is derived from 0-W9 and $pr}v, 
and means that moderation, temperance, integrity, 
soundness, in which consist the preservation, the safety 

1 This Sermon was preached at Eton College. 



serm. xxvi.] SOBEEMINDEDNJESS. 255 

of the mind. " There is a way," says Solomon, " which 
seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the 
ways of death." That way is the path of self-indul- 
gence, of wilfulness, of intemperance, of excess. That 
path is the destruction of all nobleness, of all wisdom, of 
all life. It is the very dissolution of the immortal soul. 
The Greeks therefore called it -^aKK^poavvrj, d/coXaata, 
dacorla, looseness of mind, absence of self-restraint, 
a condition that cannot be saved ; which, in one direc- 
tion, makes the soul soft and vulnerable, in another 
headstrong and profligate ; in both cases loose, wandering, 
unapt for noble efforts, enslaved by base principles, 
prefering the senses to the spirit, the appetite to the 
reason, the death of sin to the life of God. The Greeks 
represented its effects in the grand legend of the 
Odyssey. The sailors of Ulysses, greedily drinking the 
poisoned cup of Circe, are smitten by her wand and 
changed to swine. ISTot so their chief; he confronts the 
sorceress ; when she smites him with her wand he dis- 
dainfully draws his sword and drives her to her knees. 
Why ? Because Hermes has given him a spray of magic 
herb, which is sovereign against these sorceries. What 
is that magic flower ? It is ac^^poavvrj — it is sober- 
mindedness. It is a thought followed by a resolve, a 
resolve followed by an action, it is an action matured 
into a habit. It is the sovereignty of law and duty. 
It is the bridle of passion. It is the basis of integrity. 
It is the safeguard of all noble dispositions. It is, as 
one of our poets sings, 

". To sit, self-governed, in the fiery prime 
Of youth, obedient at the feet of law. " x 

It is the one effectual foundation which no insidious 

1 M. Arnold. 



256 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

current at the basis of our being can ever sap or wash 
away. In one word, " it is the life of God in the soul 
of man." 

Now, in exhorting you to sobermindedness, I might 
treat the subject in many ways. I might show you the 
necessity, I might show you the difficulty ; yet, in spite 
of the difficulty, I might show you the possibility of its 
attainment. Yes, it is possible for those between whom 
and the fires of youth the Spirit of God has drawn His 
sevenfold veil — it is possible for those who listen to the 
voice behind them saying, " This is the way, walk ye in 
it," when they turn aside to the right hand or to the 
left. Life, it is true, is a struggle of conflicting elements, 
a contest of opposite tendencies, a law in the members 
warning against the law of the mind. Eeason and 
temptation, duty and impulse, right and wrong, are ever 
striving for the mastery in the battle-field of the human 
heart ; and, as when an archer would shoot an arrow, he 
draws the bowstring with one hand to his shoulder, and 
pushes from him with the other the curving wood, and 
then the string twangs, and, driven by the opposite 
motions, the swift arrow whizzes to its mark — such an 
arrow is the soul of man. In one direction the senses 
and the passions strain the quivering string ; but the 
conscience, like the tough and curving wood, must 
restrain their tension, and the strong hand of the archer 
must guide and aim the arrow's flight ; must, like the 
young Sun-God pierce the Python of corruption, must 
grasp the silver bowstring, and send the arrow hurtling 
into the monster's heart. 

Let me then, as one slight fragment of the subject, 
ask you to think of one or two only of the directions 
in which you may strive after the acquisition of this 
high virtue. Let me point you to one or two only of 



xxvi.J SOBERMINDEDNESS. 257* 

the lowest rungs of that ladder of sunbeams, at the 
summit of which is the Son of God — one or two of the 
first steps on that path of righteousness, which is indeed 
no primrose path of dalliance, — which must be trodden 
often, as many of earth's noblest have trod it with 
bleeding feet and aching brow, but whereon " law and 
conscience will attend you on the right hand and on 
the left, walking by your sides with steadfast counten- 
ances and measured steps> and making you feel that you 
may not deviate or stop, lest they should turn upon you 
their intolerable looks of calm and awful condemnation." x 
I. Now foremost among these most essential means of 
attaining to this chief glory of the youthful character, 
I would place seriousness of r^ind. And when I say 
this, do not for a moment think that in bidding you be 
serious, we would bid you be other than happy. Let not 
the Evil One, or those who do his work, let them not per- 
suade you that seriousness is sadness, or righteousness 
depression. Eeligion is no " haggard necromancer " to be 
driven away, but a noble and loving friend, to be nobly 
welcomed. Innocence, so far from being the foe to true 
happiness, is her twin sister. Guilt is her foe. Innocent 
happiness, yes, that is within the reach of you all ; but 
guilty happiness, there is no such thing. Guilty pleasure 
there is ; it is " delusive and envenomed pleasure, its 
hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison tortures 
afterwards, its effects deprave for ever." But guilt and 
happiness — between these there is so deadly a repug- 
nance that never can they even join hands. In bidding 
you be serious, God does not forbid you to be bright. 
Let the web of your youthful days be shot through with 
gold, and woven, an God will, of crimson in the grain. 
That web of life, hereafter, will quite inevitably be 

1 Whewell, Sermons ', p. 8. 
M.S. S 



258 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [sbrm. 

dimmed ; for the most prosperous of you, misfortune 
will rend it ; for the most innocent, sin will stain it ; for 
the most fortunate, the dust of disappointment will 
gather and lie upon it : for all, thick and heavy the 
ashes of the churchyard will fall over it at last. But 
ere those days come, and those years draw nigh, the 
brighter it is the more blessed is it. But do you not 
think, or rather, do you not know, that it will be 
brightest of all for him whose brow is open, whose 
heart is innocent, whose conscience is clear, who is 
trying, humbly and heartily, to work in himself, and for 
his fellows, the work of God ? Will endless amusement, 
will wasted opportunities, will abused privileges, will 
stolen waters, and bread eaten in secret, make up to 
anyone for the loss of virtue, the loss of manliness, the 
loss of self-respect ? Will the laughter of fools, which is 
as the crackling of thorns under a pot — will the riotous 
living in a far-off land make up to him for that inward 
misery, when 

" The powers, that tend the soul 
To help it from the death that cannot die, 
And save it even in extremes, begin 
To vex and plague it ? " 

There is a seriousness which is anguish ; but this is the 
seriousness of retribution, and differs far from that holy 
and happy seriousness, that earnest, sober, reverent 
thoughtfulness at quiet moments on bended knees, to 
which God invites you, and which alone can save life 
from sin and sharhe. And you cannot escape from its 
needfulness. You have a dial on your chapel terrace, 
you have a clock in your school turret. You may 
squander time, you may determine to take no account 
of it ; but can you hinder that creeping of the shadow 
on the dial which marks out our destinies? — can you 



xxvl] SOBEEMINDEDNJESS. 259 

silence that ticking of the clock that beats out the 
little lives of men ? — can you obliterate that inscription 
which warns you that, Pereunt et imputantur ? 

When will you who hear me die ? In one sense it 
may be in a few short years ; but in another sense 
never. The sun may be shattered ; and the moon and 
stars rolled in one common fire with the heaven in 
winch they shine ; the solid earth we tread on may 
crumble into dust; but you shall live. The sinful 
body may die, but not the soul ; and therefore you shall 
never die ; for your souls are you. And therefore, make 
time for serious thoughts. Let no day pass without 
some memory of solemn things. Each morning as you 
rise, remind yourselves that " God spake these words and 
said " ; each evening as you lie down to rest, let God's 
angels close the door of your heart on thoughts of 
purity and peace. The soul that has never lived face 
to face with eternity is a vulgar soul ; the life that has 
never learnt the high law of holiness is a ruined and 
a wasted life. 

" AVho never ate with tears his bread, 

jSTor, through the long-drawn midnight hours 
Sate weeping on his lonely bed, 

He knows ye not, ye heavenly powers." 

II. And next to seriousness, as a first step to sober- 
mindedness, be not surprised if I place obedience. That 
high virtue — the true school of empire — has two appli- 
cations — a narrower and a wider; but the two are 
essentially connected. In the narrower sense it means 
the opposite of vain presumption, of spurious indepen- 
dence, of self-asserting importance; it means loyalty, 
humility, modesty of character and of demeanour, 
cheerful submission to just authority : in its wider — to 
which the narrower leads — it means the law of duty 

s 2 



260 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

cheerfully accepted as the law of life. Let us take the 
narrower first. As the principle of the forest lies in the 
acorn, so does the germ of every duty spring directly, 
from the thought of God. Now from our earliest years 
God delegates some of His authority to our fellow-men — 
first to our parents, then to all set over us. And there- 
fore respect for authority is a sacred duty, as it is also 
a divine command. Never has there been an age where 
that command has been violated which has not become 
a corrupt age. Never a country where it was neglected, 
which has not been a despicable country. In the 
loyalty, in the humility, in the obedience of youth — in 
their reverence for their parents, in their respect for all 
their elders, — have ever rested a nation's hopes. You 
thirst for honour — vou do well ; but before honour is 
humility ; and without humility there can be no true 
obedience. And this is the rule of every great society, 
as it is, in truth, the rule of the universe of God. 
Wherein lay the sole greatness of Sparta ? Was it not 
revealed on that epitaph over the Three Hundred at 
Thermopylae — 

" Go, tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, 
That here obedient to their laws we lie ! " 

Wherein lay the true majesty of Eome ? Was it not 
on the solid bases of filial and of national obedience 
that she built the magnificent superstructure of universal 
power? If you would know why Eome was great, 
consider that poor Roman soldier whose armed skeleton 
was found in a recess near the gate of Pompeii. When 
on that guilty little city burst the sulphurous storm, it 
would have been easy for him, as for so many, to escape. 
Why did he not ? Because to escape would have been 
to abandon his post, and so — the unnamed hero — rather 



xxvi.] SOBEEMINDEDNESS. 261 

than disobey, he just dropped the visor of his helmet, 
and stood there to die. And need I go to Greece and 
Kome ? Is not obedience — is not simple loyalty to 
simple duty — the basis of all that is greatest in 
England's honour too ? Is not this the glory of 
Balaclava ? 

" Forward, the Light Brigade ! 
Take the guns, Nolan said : 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die : 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. " 

That was twenty years ago ; and was there not another 
such instance — an instance of men in scores preferring 
death to disobedience some ten years ago? It was 
at the wreck of the Birkenhead. The good ship had 
crashed at sunset against a sunken rock ; the boats were 
too few, the sea was rushing in ; sharks were thrusting 
their horrible black fins through the white breakers of 
the boiling surf; and amid the shrieks of women and 
children some one clamoured that all should save them- 
selves who could. Then, clear and loud, rang out the 
voice of the good colonel, bidding the men to their ranks. 
That order meant nothing less than death, death in 
those raging waters, — death among those savage sharks 
— but it was instantly obeyed. In perfect order the 
boats were pushed from the shattered vessel, rowing 
the women and children to the shore, while, inch by 
inch, the ship sank down and down, but still under 
steadfast men, till the last great wave rolled over her, 
and " obedient even unto death," brave men — loyal to 
their chief, loyal to England, loyal to God — sank to 
their noble burial under the bloody surf. 



262 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

III. I will mention but one virtue more out of many, 
which is simply indispensable to him among you who 
would be soberminded : it is diligence. It has a lower 
and a higher sense, but remember that, in its very 
lowest sense of all, it is necessary. A diligent man 
is not indeed always holy, but an idle man cannot 
be. A diligent man will not always be unassaulted 
by temptation, but an idle man never is. He who 
can sit for hours in his room, doing nothing, thinking 
of nothing, talking of nothirjg, and of things worse 
than nothing — he who can deliberately make pleasure, 
and not progress, moral and intellectual, the sole object 
of his school-life — in him there can be no sober- 
mindedness. And why? Because the faintest trace 
of it would impress on him the two great truths, one 
that the work which God requires of us all to do is 
vast, and the other, that the time to do it in is short. 
The great work of the ancient physician begins with 
the memorable words : " Life is short ; art long ; 
opportunity fleeting ; experiment slippery ; judgment 
difficult/' But perhaps you do not think that the time 
for work is short ? Alas ! you soon will know it ; swiftly, 
imperceptibly does boyhood flow into youth, and youth 
into manhood ; and much is he to be pitied who, after 
a boyhood ingloriously wasted, if not pitiably degraded, 
suddenly finds himself standing upon the threshold of 
manhood, a bankrupt in strength and virtue, because, 
instead of living on the just income of the present, he 
has been madly squandering that vigour of his youth 
which was meant to be the capital of his future. I 
would entreat you for your own sake, for England's 
sake — you, the hopes of this great nation, you who are 
to bear up the ancient honours of this godly and 
virtuous island — never be idle. If you are, sadly and 



xxvi.] SOBERMINDEDNESS. 263 

soon shall the days of emptiness and dreariness set iu, 
the youth of folly succeeded by the old age of cards ; 
but if, from boyhood onward, you are wise and self- 
denying, you will find that the time for lofty pleasures 
can never pass away. Look at the mountain-ash. 
Early in summer it clothes itself in its delicate and 
odorous flowers ; and, when these fall, for a time it has 
nothing but leaf to show : but look at it again in 
autumn, and then, " decorated from outmost fringe to 
topmost pinnacle/' it is one pyramid of glowing scarlet. 
That brilliant fruitage of its maturity is nothing in the 
world but the ripened blossom of its youth. Be you 
like the mountain-ash. Gather when young, and you 
shall possess when old the riches of knowledge and of 
wisdom. Nor this alone, but the mere act of gathering, 
the mere grandeur of a pure and spiritual ideal, the 
mere effect of time duly appreciated and wisely used, 
shall save you from a thousand remorseful memories 
and vague regrets — shall help you to be in God's 
sight soberminded, — i.e. to acquire your bodies, to save 
your souls. 

I have kept you too long; yet allow me one last 
word. I have tried to- show you that seriousness, 
obedience, diligence are necessary to sober-mindedness ; 
as frivolity, presumption, idleness are its utter bane. 
And to you, who listen with meek heart and due 
reverence to the messages of God, — -to you who wish 
to learn — who have tried to learn — the dignity of 
seriousness, the grace of obedience, the inexorable duty 
of a manly diligence, — to you I say, respect yourselves : 
respect yourselves, for God made you, for Christ re- 
deemed you ; respect yourselves for the dignity of God's 
image is upon 'you, and the seal of your redemption has 
been marked upon your brows. DominaminL Bule- 



264 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xxvi. 

rule yourselves ; rule the advocates of sin and folly ; 
rule every evil thing that would assault and thwart you. 
In the name of Christ your Saviour be kings and 
priests. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder, 
the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under 
feet. Go forth in this confidence; go forth from 
strength to strength. You will meet with difficulties ; 
stand up to them with dauntless front. You will meet 
the sorceress — drive her to her knees. Stronger are 
they that are with, than they that are against you. 
Against you are all the shams, the emptinesses, the 
frivolities, — all the passing fashions; all the lying 
atheisms ; all the prurient vanities ; — with you is all 
that is sweet and strong, all supreme and noble men, 
all divine and eternal principles ; and above all, there 
is your Father God. With the aid of His Holy Spirit 
in the present, with the gift of His free forgiveness for 
all the past, be faithful to Him, be faithful to your- 
selves, be faithful to your fellow-men ; and then, let the 
earth be smitten into ruin, and the heaven be shrivelled 
into smoke, but you — like all the saints and children of 
the kingdom — you shall be partakers of God's eternity, 
and even in this world shall not have lived in vain. 

October 18, 1874. (Preached also at Eton.) 



SERMON XXVII. 

NOT FAR FROM THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN 

Mark xii. 34. 
1 ' Thou art not far from the kingdom of Heaven. " 

A certain Scribe, struck with the wisdom with which 
our Blessed Lord had silenced the captious questions of 
Pharisees and Sadducees, stood up and asked Him 
" Which was the first and greatest commandment ? " It 
is one of those miserable questions which are sure to 
come in vogue when the letter is exalted above the 
spirit, and theology held in more account than life. 
The rabbis, with the fatal ingenuity of a perverse 
literalism, had counted up the 365 prohibitions and 
248 precepts of the Mosaic Law ; and, understanding 
nothing of the royal unity of law as directly involved 
in the unity of God — nothing of the fact that outward 
service is valueless without the love of the heart — 
nothing of the fact that a man may only offend in one 
point, and yet be guilty of all — they were constantly 
discussing the relative importance of fringes and phy- 
lacteries, the relative heinousness of forswearing by the 
temple and forswearing by its gold. Not so our Lord. 
He, as ever, going straight to the heart of the matter, 
laid down one eternal principle. Pointing, perhaps, to 
the Scribe's phylactery, in which, on a strip of folded 



IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

parchment, was written the text to which He referred, 
He said, "Hear, oh Israel; the Lord our God is one 
Lord ; " and He added that we must love God with all 
the heart that lives and worships, with all the soul 
which enjoys and feels, with all the understanding 
which thinks and questions, with all the strength 
which achieves and wills. And this alone comprises 
all ; but, being fallen and guilty, man requires some- 
thing more, both as an illustration and a test. Love to 
man, then, is the natural sequence, the necessary 
condition of love to God. The second table is but a 
method of our fulfilment of the first ; there is no less, 
no greater ; nothing subordinate, nothing unnecessary. 
Was not this what Moses himself had symbolized when 
he had bade them wear tassels on the hem of the 
garment — two, as the tables of the law were two — each 
consisting of various threads, as the details of the general 
commandments were many, but both bound together by 
one prominent cord of brilliant blue, as if to show that 
their unity — nay, their very existence — depended on the 
one indivisible law of heavenly love ? Of this even 
the better Pharisees were aware. The Scribe at once 
recognised the truth — at once referred it to that grand 
passage of the prophet Micah, which had shown that to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
our God, was better than holocausts and hecatombs of 
all the cattle upon a thousand hills. 

1. Our Lord was pleased with the candour, the 
wisdom, the enthusiasm, of his reply. It was His 
special tenderness, it was His immense love, that He 
would never break the bruised reed or quench the 
smoking flax. In His infinite holiness, in His heavenly 
innocence, He did not loathe the leper's touch or the 
harlot's tears. Though these Scribes and Pharisees 



xxvii.] NOT FAB FROM KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 267 

would have embittered to the very dregs any life less 
noble than His, He could praise even His worst foes, 
and gently and kindly said to the Scribe, " Thou art not 
far from the kingdom of heaven." To such a nature 
as that of the Scribe — a nature not ungenerous, if very 
faulty, not unenlightened, though much misled — how 
precious, how healing, would these words have been. 
Oh! let us not be all so afraid of words of hearty 
encouragement and honest praise. They reinspire the 
fading effort ; they reinvigorate the trembling arm ; they 
fall like the dew of heaven upon the fainting soul. The 
sunbeam touches the mountain, and at its touch the 
heavy load of winter which the hurricane could not 
dislodge melts and slips insensibly away, and where 
but- yesterday was snow, to-day is green grass and 
gentian flower. It is even so with words of sympathy, 
which are so rare, alas ! while they can cheer or bless, 
but which only, when they are useless, fall thick as a 
dust over the buried dust. But Christ was not thus 
jealous of making anyone a trifle happier. He knew 
how to give natural encouragement and generous praise. 
" Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona ; " " Behold an 
Israelite indeed ; " "I have not found so great faith, 
no, not in Israel ; " " She hath done what she could ; " 
" Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven : " — 
such are a few of Christ's words of approval. It is 
something to abstain from slander, and censoriousness, 
and the hard luxury of injustice ; something to be like 
that good man who passed everything which he had to 
say of others through the three sieves : Is it just ? Is it 
necessary ? Is it kind ? But it is more to be like Christ, 
to be generous and cordial, to have " the glow of sym- 
pathy " with " the bloom of modesty ; " not to be too vain 
to appreciate ; not to be too envious to help and cheer. 



268 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

2. " Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven/' 
What was this kingdom of heaven? Our Lord, at 
different times, used it in different senses : sometimes 
of the new dispensation which was dawning on a weary 
and wicked world ; sometimes of individual righteous- 
ness and joy in believing ; sometimes of the glory in 
heaven to come. But with Him who is an eternal Now, 
these three senses are one. To be of the kingdom of 
heaven is nothing less than Christianity, salvation, 
eternal life. And this Scribe was not far from the 
kingdom of heaven; he was listening to its precepts; 
he was talking to its King; it was but to believe, to 
repent, to pray, and all — the secret of the past, the 
blessedness of the present, the glories of the future — 
all, all were his. 

And is it not ours ? is it not yours and mine ? Oh, 
as far as mere privileges are concerned, it is infinitely 
more ours than it was this Scribe's. The cross upon 
our foreheads can only be obliterated, the title-deeds of 
our birthright only lost, by our own apostasy. The late 
king of Prussia was one day playing with some little 
children, and asked them to what realm of nature 
various things belonged. He showed them a precious 
stone, and they said to the mineral kingdom ; a rose, 
and they said to the vegetable ; a leopard's skin, and 
they said to the animal. " And to what kingdom do I 
belong?" he asked, pointing to himself. " To the kingdom 
of heaven," said one sweet little voice in prompt reply. 
Yes ; oh that we had the grace always, at all moments, 
to remember it ! You, and I, and every baptised Christian 
in this Christian land, are by birth, by baptism, by 
inheritance, by privileges, members of the kingdom of 
heaven. 

3. I see you seated in this fair house of God, silent, 



xxvn.] NOT FAR FROM KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 269 

attentive, reverent. It is the blessed Sabbath day, and 
for many of you a Sabbath of special significance. You 
have been hearing the solemn organ-music ; you have 
been joining in psalm, and canticle, and hymn. Free, 
and quick, and sharper than any two-edged sword, the 
Word of God is in your hands. All of you have lived 
in Christian homes. Most of you have had a father's 
high example and a mother's yearning prayers. I know 
that you pray. I know that God does not suffer your 
consciences to sleep. I know that in moments of guilt, 
in moments of peril, in moments of remorse, amid the 
busy labours of the day, amid the silent watches of the 
night, I know that that Voice says to you, " My son, if 
sinners entice thee, consent thou not ; " or, " Be not 
weary in well doing ; " or, " Be sure your sin will find 
you out ; " or, " What is this that thou hast done ? " 
And in all this, outwardly and visibly, and here and 
now, it is true of the very guiltiest among you, that 
" Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven." 

4. Not far : yet you may not be therein. These are 
but Christian privileges ; they go for nothing, or, rather, 
they go only for this : the certainty of a dread responsi- 
bility, the possibility of a deeper condemnation. Do 
not think that if you be wicked, and hard, and proud, 
and sensual, and impenitent, that it will help you to 
have said, " Lord, Lord," or to have borne the Christian's 
name. " Trust ye not in lying words, saying, the temple 
of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the 
Lord are these." It did not avail King Uzziah to stand 
in the holy place, or to swing the golden censer, when 
lo ! on his forehead was the leprous spot. It did not 
avail Balaam, the splendid sorcerer, to have uttered 
many a glorious truth, when he committed that last, 
worst, most accursed, most detestable of sins, by doing 



270 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

the devil's work and corrupting others ; and so, after 
wishing that he might die the death of the righteous, 
and his last end be like his, he perished, as he deserved, 
by the pitiless, griding, contemptuous swords of those 
whom he had striven to seduce, in the red battle among 
the routed enemies of God. Not to be far from the 
kingdom of God is still to be outside, and that outside 
is cold, and waste, and dark ; and without are dogs ; and 
pride, and lust, and shame, and the mala mentis gaudia 
are there. Judas was an apostle ; Judas was not far 
from the kingdom of heaven ; yet Judas committed the 
foulest sin that history records to us ; and how did Judas 
die? 

II. But, my brethren, there is a yet nearer and better 
sense in which it may be said of many of you, " Thou 
art not far from the kingdom of heaven.' ' For far the 
most of you, not all— I will not say all, but far the most 
of you — not in outward privileges only, but also in 
conduct and principles, in heart and life, possess many 
of its gifts. In knowledge and awakenment, in docility 
and sweetness, in graceful obedience and cordial grati- 
tude, in manly diligence and unswerving truthfulness, 
I believe that there are many of you to whom, as to the 
candid Scribe, the living Saviour might have uttered 
the same gentle and approving words. We do not 
despise these virtues : nay, we love, we honour, we 
rejoice in them ; and yet, remember always, they bespeak 
no change in heart; they are not enough; they may 
coexist with a state of sin, and therefore are not a state 
of grace. In spite of them the heart may not be God's. 
The tree is not tested by its green leaves or by its vernal 
blossoms, but by its fruit ; and if, for all its green leaves, 
its root be as rottenness and its blossoms go up as dust, 
who then shall stay the uplifted axe ? If it bear fruit — 



zxvu.] NOT FAR FROM KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 271 

if not, cut it down ; why cumbereth it the ground? You 
do not swear ; you do not break the Sabbath day ; you 
do not steal ; you do not lie ; you are not guilty of 
drunkenness ; you have never led others into sin ; you 
have not spoken wicked blasphemy ; you do not -sport 
with your own deceiving, and foam out your own shame. 
You do well. But do not even the Gentiles so ? It is 
not Christ only who condemns such sins ; it is not from 
the pulpit only that they are reprobated ; the world, too, 
brands them ; it does not admit to the cheat, the liar, 
the drunkard, the blasphemer, her title of gentleman. 
Nay, the world goes even farther. Its tone is far more 
severe than that of some you; it condemns wasteful 
gluttony ; it condemns aimless idleness ; it condemns 
inordinate amusement ; it condemns the sacrifice of duty 
to pleasure; it condemns the consuming much and 
producing little ; it condemns the " sitting down at the 
feast of life and going away without paying the reckon- 
ing." And all this is so far good ; yet all this does not 
yet make a man of the kingdom of heaven. These are 
not the one thing needful ; they are not repentance ; 
not the new birth ; and " Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
except a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom 
of heaven.'' 

III. " Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven." 
The doors of paradise are open near you; you may 
breathe snatches of its odours ; you may catch echoes of 
its melodies ; you may feel, at times, the sweetness of 
its angel presences, the hovering of its angel wings. 
Oh, si non procul es, intra ! Oh, it needs but the violence 
of a faithful purpose, one spring over the threshold, 
and you are safe. But stop ! there is an amulet, a 
charm on that threshold. There shall in no wise enter 
anything that defileth : for one word is written on that 



272 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [ssrm. 

threshold, over which none can lightly tread. What is 
that one word ? It is repentance. That kingdom of 
heaven is eternal, is infinite ; it has many mansions ; but 
the gate is single, the path narrow, the roof low. Think 
you that you can enter full of evil and wicked thoughts ? 
think you that you can enter swollen with wind and tha 
rank mist of your own sensual conceit ? He who would 
enter must bow the insolent head and purify the cor- 
rupted heart. He must break, if need be, his old life in 
two, and fling away the worser half. He must cut a 
deep line between his present and his past. In one 
word he must be converted ; he must be born again. 

IV. It is not often that any crisis of life comes to us 
consciously and suddenly. As the tree falls so it lies ; 
but as the tree has been gradually and gradually leaning, 
so it falls. And thus it is that the lost soul seldom 
knows what was its last opportunity, what the last 
little act that consummated its ruin — for what poor mess 
of pottage it sold its heaven. It is done on a common 
day ; it is done in an ordinary hour ; no sigh of pity 
runs through the shuddering foliage ; no wing of angel 
flashes from the silent blue. Yet surely, inevitably, 
" he that avoideth not small faults, by little and little 
falleth into greater." A watch may be but a second 
wrong ; a mere touch would regulate it ; the opportunity 
is neglected ; the second goes on increasing ; it becomes 
an hour, many hours ; and alas ! how soon does the 
watch become wrong wholly, not only useless, but mis- 
leading. You who have been confirmed, and who have 
forgotten, and have not kept the vow of your confirma- 
tion, you know how fatally it is so. And you know, 
too, that on no occasion probably in all life is a human 
soul brought face to face with the test of a known 
conscious choice between good and evil, between blessing 



xxvn.] NOT FAB FBOM KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 273 

and cursing, between life and death, between God and 
Satan, between the world and heaven, between the lusts 
of the flesh and the aspirations of the soul, — on no 
occasion probably are the interests of the spiritual life 
staked, as it were, so absolutely on a single die— as it 
was to you on the day of your confirmation, as it will 
be to-morrow to nearly one hundred of you more. 
There are in life unknown, unconscious crises ; to- 
morrow will be to many of you a known, a conscious 
crisis ; on the spirit in which you meet it, in which you 
have been preparing to meet it, in which you mean to 
carry out its obligations, in which you purpose to 
approach its new and sacred privileges, how much of 
the peace or misery, of the shame or nobleness, of your 
future life depends ! Almost might we apply to it the 
solemn appeal and fancy of the poet : 

" There is a light cloud near the moon : 
Tis passing now, 'twill pass full soon ; 
If, by the time its vapoury sail 
Hath ceased her shaded orb to vail, 
Thine heart within thee be not changed, 
Then God and man are both avenged, 
Dark will thy doom be — darker still 
Thine immortality of ill." 1 

Oh ! of that great occasion of your life it is true, if it 
be true of any moment of life, Ex hoe momento penclet 
cetemitas. And you, whose choice was made for you 
long ago — you whose service is pledged — whose military 
oath is recorded ; can it, shall it, be that any of you will 
be among the enemies of good, — you among those who 
increase, and not diminish the sum of the world's wicked- 
ness — you of them who, out of their own base, wretched 
weakness, pause not to imperil their own souls and the 
souls of others — you among those who offend Christ's 
little ones — you under the scope of those words of 

1 Byron, Siege of Corinth. 
M.S. T 



274 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [seem, xxvii. 

immeasurable ruin from the lips of immeasurable Love ? 
Oh, your place is not there. Leave even now that banded 
apostasy ; for you know not whether ever again it will 
be possible for you to do so. Death is always uncertain. 
Who knows but even now, for some of us, for you or 
me, the fatal bowstring may have twanged, the fatal 
arrow have leapt from the string ? If it have, no seven- 
fold shield can stay its flight. Yet, though we know 
not for how long, we still have time — be it but one day, 
one hour, one week — to repent and to turn to God. And 
if the arrow smite us — be it soon or be it late — it shall 
have no sting, no victory then. It shall but glance 
down from heaven the welcome, the blessed signal, that, 
pure, happy, redeemed, forgiven, we may pass into the 
Presence of our God — not far from the kingdom of 
heaven now, we shall be in it — in it for ever and for 
ever — then. 

March 14, 1875. 



SERMON XXVIII. 

RUNNERS FOR A PRIZE. 

1 Cor. ix. 24. 

" Know ye not that they which run in a race, run all, but one 
receiveth the prize ? So run that ye may obtain." 

Phil. iii. 13. 

" This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and 
reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the 
mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." 

Heb. xii. 1, 2. 

1 ' Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud 
of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so 
easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before 
us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. " 

These three texts are in themselves a sermon. They 
show how deeply the imagery and incidents of the 
Isthmian games — which were simply the athletic 
sports of Greece — had impressed the quick imagination 
of that great apostle, with whom, for convenience' sake, 
I may here also class the unknown author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. Writing, for instance, to 
Corinth, the gay and dissolute capital of Achaia, and 
appealing to the spectacle with which they were all so 
familiar, and of which they were all so proud, he tells 
]hem that, as thev had seen their chosen youth striving 

T 2 



276 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

in the racecourse, so they were to run, that they might 
obtain. In the lively imaginations of his Greek converts, 
the words would summon up a vivid picture — the level 
stadium under its flooding sunshine — the intent gaze of 
the thronging multitudes — the strained muscles, the 
passionate eagerness, the strong determination of the 
runners — the judges distributing to the successful 
athletes those green garlands of Isthmian pine — 
the glad, bright faces, the hearty congratulations, the 
loud applause of the victor's friends. On such familiar 
reminiscences he founds high moral lessons — he 
translates to a loftier region the scenes of daily life, 
and bathes common incidents in the pure light which 
falls on them from high teachings of the moral law. 
In this he does but follow the example of his Master, 
Christ, and the intense and searching simplicity of His 
habitual illustrations. He, as I have said elsewhere, 
" spoke of green fields, and springing flowers, and 
budding trees ; of the red or lowering sky ; of sun- 
rise and sunset ; of wind and rain ; of light and 
storm ; of clouds and lightning ; of stream and river ; 
of stars and lamps; of salt and bread; of nets and 
fish ; of quivering bulrushes and burning weeds ; of 
rent garments and bursting wine-skins ; of precious 
pearls and lost pieces of money." To follow such pre- 
cedents needs no apology, nor need I hesitate to say 
that it is your just-concluded races and your athletic 
sports — as real to you as the Isthmian games were 
to the people of Corinth — which have suggested my 
thoughts to-day. Those races and sports may, to the 
thoughtful mind, shadow forth much that lies beyond 
themselves. You will be able to think of many sug- 
gestive incidents on which I shall not touch. You 
have seen some, for instance, put down their names 



xxyiii.] RUNNERS FOR A PRIZE. 277 

who, when the time came — either from accident, or 
because they had meanwhile changed their minds, or 
because they had not trained — did not appear at the 
starting-point at all. Is there nothing like this in the 
Christian life ? You have seen some start well, run 
for a time even in the front, then falter, flag, fall into 
the rear, drop out of the course altogether. Is there 
nothing like this in the Christian life ? Again : you 
have seen a disheartened runner, cheered by a word of 
encouragement, pluck up strength, pass his rival, spring 
to the front, and win the prize. Is there nothing like 
this in the Christian race? Yes; there is something 
like all these things. In this racecourse of a holy life 
where God has placed us, some put down their names 
indeed to run, but never even start. Others begin to 
run and fall out ; others stop short from weakness and 
irresolution; others deliberate] y turn aside. The race 
sweeps on, but they are not in it. The prizes are given, 
but there is no prize for them. 

But in the few plain words which I shall speak this 
morning I will not dwell on these or other illustrations, 
because it will be enough to consider briefly those main 
contrasts and main resemblances which, in the texts 
which I have read to j 7 ou, were seized with such 
unerring accuracy by St. Paul himself : — 

I. Now the first contrast which struck St. Paul was 
this. In the Isthmian races many ran, but one alone 
could win ; for that one there was the flush of success — 
the thrill, the happiness, the exultation of triumph ; 
for the others — though they may have deserved as well, 
though their failure may have been solely due to acci- 
dent, though they may have used their best efforts — 
there was failure, mortification, defeat — they had to 
go home with their downcast looks, their frustrated 



278 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

endeavours, their disappointed hearts. It is so, alas ! 
in most of earth's too numerous competitions; the 
success of one means the failure of many ; and men, it 
has been said, grow by degrees each to deem of himself 
" as only one among the myriad of horses set to drag 
on the chariot of Time — to deem that his only pleasure 
is to snatch what provender he can as he rushes along 
the way — that his only glory is to surpass his yoke- 
fellows in speed — and that, anon, when his strength 
fails, the chariot will pass over him, and millions of 
hoofs will trample him to dust." But, thank God ! 
so it is not in our heavenly race. How miserable 
would it be if it were ! What a happy thought it is 
that none who enter that race are defeated; that no 
rivalries can enter into it ; no jealousies spoil ; no 
failure embitter. Like the sweet air, like the summer 
sunshine, the glories and rewards of it may be enjoyed 
to the very full by all who truly seek them : if one 
succeeds, the faces of all are brightened ; and so far 
from envy at what this man is famed for, or for what 
another is preferred — the individual happiness is so 
thoroughly the general happiness — that, like the com- 
mon light reflected from within a globe of crystal, the 
radiances of each pure spirit are but multiplied and 
made intense by myriads of reflections. Eun only in the 
Christian race, and the prize is yours. You need not 
be like the brave adventurer who wrote with diamond 
on the window-pane — 

"Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall," 

nor need the warning written beneath it by the Maiden 
Queen, — 

" If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all." 



xxviii.] RUNNERS FOR A PRIZE. 279 

No ; let not your heart be troubled. In your Father's 
house are many mansions ; in your Father's hand are 
many crowns; and though myriads fail, yet the goal, 
thank God! shall be reached by a great multitude 
whom no man can number, of all peoples and nations 
and languages ; and I heard the number of them, even 
ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of 
thousands. 

And that prize, those crowns, — there is a second 
contrast. All that the racers got directly, their sole 
prize ostensibly, was a withering garland of green pine. 
They struggled for a shadow ; the shout of popular 
applause, empty and evanescent as the quivering air 
which gave it breath, fame which palled before the 
week was over, hollow glories and disappointing 
successes, which would neither sate the soul's hunger 
nor quench its thirst. Those green leaves, from a tree 
which grew on every hill, and withered before the sun 
had set — what a type were they of all earth's prizes ! 
The world has never even deceived itself about them, 
and in thousands of proverbs and allegories has 
branded the bitterness of its own chosen pleasures, and 
the inanity of its own cherished hopes. The cloud of 
Ixion, the stone of Sisyphus, the wasted voice of Echo, 
the self- withering infatuation of Narcissus, Pygmalion 
pining for love of a statue, Midas starving in the midst 
of gold, the wings of Icarus, melting even while he 
soared, and harrowing his soul with the coming terror 
of the inevitable fall, — such are earth's treasures ; and 
even were they as real as they are illusory, how short 
a time — for what a brief and fleeting spell of youth — 
they last ! " Ai ! ai ! " sings the sweet Greek poet, 
" when the soft plants perish in the garden, the bright 
green parsley and the curly blooming anethus, they live 



280 IN TEE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

again and spring for another year; but we, the great, 
and strong, wise men, we, when once we die, forgotten 
in the hollow grave, 

evdofiss ev /xaXa fiaKpbv drepfxova vrfyperov Virvov 

we sleep the long, long, illimitable sleep that never 
wakes." And all sacred teaching, and all Christian song 
echo the same thing ; the things which men seek, the 
Scriptures tell us, are but as the grass of the fading 
flower — as the stream which fails in summer — as clusters 
of the poisonous vine — as apples of Sodom, that fill 
the mouth with gravel and bitterness — as stones of the 
wilderness, which cannot be turned to bread : and — as 
the light lyrist was forced to sing, — 

" And false the light on Glory's plume 

As fading hues of even ; 
And Valour's wreath, and Beauty's bloom 
Are garlands given to the tomb : 

There's nothing true but heaven." 

Nothing but that, — but that is the prize for which 
we run; the peace of God, the deliverance from sin, 
the eternal glory and the crown, not of withering pine 
but of immortal amaranth, the crown incorruptible, 
undefiled, that fadeth not away. 

II. But if there are these two contrasts between the 
single as compared to the universal success, and the 
poor compared to the infinite reward, there are also 
some instructive resemblances between the racer's 
running and the Christian's life. 

1. Here, for instance, was one : that both races inevit- 
ably required present effort and past self-denial. " He 
who striveth for the mastery," says St. Paul to the 
Corinthians, " is temperate in all things." You know 
perfectly well that it is useless for an ordinary boy to 
run in a race who has not, at least in some measure, 



xxviii.] BUNNEBS FOB A PBIZE. 281 

trained himself to run ; useless for him to run sluggishly 
and lazily, without trying to do his best. It is not the 
loose, effeminate, lymphatic boy, who eats, and drinks, 
and is self-indulgent and lethargic, and who is loth to 
give himself any trouble, it is not this kind of boy who 
can carry off prizes in such — or indeed in any — com- 
petitions. He must at least be active and vigorous, and 
put his heart and will into what he does. Oh remember 
all of you the moral of this : if you would run the 
Christian race — the holy race for which God has placed 
you each in this stadium of the world — you too must 
be temperate in all things, not gluttonous, not soft, not 
half-hearted; you must, as St. Paul says, crucify the 
flesh with its affections and lusts ; you must mortify 
your members that are upon the earth; you must 
subdue your body as with blows, and lead it about as 
a slave to that nobler reason which dominates in every 
soul wherein vice and falseness have not, like a cancer, 
eaten it utterly away. To have been baptised, to have 
been confirmed, to have had your names put down— to 
have put down your own names for that race — when you 
don't intend to run at all, or not to run in earnest, or 
to run only as pleases yourself — this in the Christian 
life, whether you call it apostasy or hypocrisy, and 
though for a time your sin may not find you out, is 
just certain wrath and deadly ruin. And do not be 
deceived into thinking that it will be easy to change 
at any time, or to repent when you like. So as by fire — 
a fire which shall burn and scathe in proportion to the 
shamefulness of your guilt — not otherwise. It is not 
easy to run God's race. Tou have heard, indeed, of 
saints who have made their lives, — not foul, weak, 
degraded, as some lives are — not like a fretting plague- 
spot to all who come near them — but beautiful to God 



282 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 



kindled, like beacon-lights upon the holy hills ; do you 
think they reached those heights at a bound? No! 
they were men of like passions with ourselves ; their 
dangers, their weaknesses, their temptations were ours ; 
but because they fought the good fight, because they 
did not live at random, because they lived lives of 
prayer and self-denial and watchfulness, not lives of 
sham repentances, followed by unbroken transgressions — 
because, whereinsoever they had fallen into sin they 
turned from every sin which they had ever committed 
to do that which was lawful and right — thus it was that 
they gained the love of God, and His seal was on their 
foreheads ; and they ran and won, and they wrought, 
and fought and overcame. 

2. There then is one resemblance — both races re- 
quired effort ; here is a second, that they who run in 
either must get rid of every impediment, must lay 
aside every weight, koX rrjv evTreplararov afiapTtav, and 
the besetting sin, the sin that clings to the limbs like 
an enfolding robe. If you had to win a race on which 
your very life depended, would you try to run it laden 
under a crushing burden ? would you try it with a log 
tied to your feet ? would you clothe yourself for it in 
a long entangling cloak? Yet it is no less absurd 
to try to run the Christian race with all the heavy load 
upon you of worldly purposes and unrepented sins. 
This must not, cannot be. How many have asked the 
impenitent question of the wicked king, 

" May one be pardoned and retain the offence ? " 

and when met by the stern Non licet of conscience, have 
been forced like him to the despairing cry, 

" wretched state ! oh bosom black as death ! 
limed sonl that, struggling to be free, 
Art more enslaved. " 



' 



xxvin.] RUNNERS FOR A FRIZE. 283 

And there is the same thought in the Idylls of our great 
living poet; where Arthur's knight, Sir Lancelot, dis 
graced, and by a great guilt, goes down and sits by the 
river and sees the high reed wave, and says with a 
heart that almost bursts with sorrow — 

" 1 needs must break 
These bonds that so defame me. . . . 
. . . But if I would not, oh may God, 
I pray Him, send a sudden angel down 
To seize me by the hair and bear me far, 
And fling me deep in that forgotten mere 
Amid the tumbled fragments of the hills. ,, 

He well knew that until the guilt was utterly abandoned, 
was bitterly repented of, he could not be true to God's 
ideal of him, he could not die a holy man. 

III. I will mention only one more resemblance 
which struck St. Paul, which was that the runner, like 
the Christian, must ever keep his eye upon the goal. 
In that race there must be no pause, but steady perse- 
verance ; no swerving aside, but unbroken progress ; no 
looking back, but straining forward ; no meaner object to 
distract or to divert, " but this one thing I do." Here, 
too, there is the warning of wise and dearly-bought 
experience in the legends of antiquity. Atalanta stops 
to pick up the golden apples, and she is worsted in the 
race. Orpheus has regained, with his Eurydice, the 
verge of light — he looks back, and Ibi omnis effusus 
labor — wasted is all his toil. Nor is it otherwise in 
Scripture. Eemember what came to Israel sighing for 
the fleshpots of Egypt. Eemember Lot's wife; she 
looked back to the guilty city, and the suffocating, 
whirlwind caught her in its sulphurous winding-sheets, 
and she became a salt pillar on Sodom's plain. Our 
Lord Himself pointed the same warnings. "~No man, 
having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, 



284 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xxviii. 

is fit for the kingdom of God ; " and " Let the dead 
bury their dead. Follow thou Me ! " 

Such, then, are some of the contrasts, some of the 
resemblances, between the Christian's and the runner's 
race ; the contrasts that, in the Christian race, all, not 
one, may win, and that the prize is not a few shillings, 
or a few withering pine-leaves, but an immortal crown ; 
and the resemblances, that the heavenly race, like the 
earthly, can be won only by effort — can be won only by 
laying aside every weight — can be won only by steadily 
fixing the eye upon the goal. Oh let us all — for the life 
of all is a race — keep these things steadily in mind, 
let us try to help each other, for we are brothers in 
the great family of God. Let us strive in earnest, for 
the reward is infinite. Let us keep our eye upon the 
hope set before us, without which our life, even if it be 
not a curse to others, must be a failure to ourselves. In 
the race of school life, with its not ungenerous emula- 
tions, on which for many of you no little of your 
future must depend ; in the race of life itself, in 
which nothing can save you from shame and sorrow 
but energy, prudence, temperance, self-denial, self- 
purification, singleness of aim; in the race of your 
Christian calling, on which depends not only the 
happiness, the nobleness, the purity of your lives, but 
even the safety of your immortal souls ; — be strong, be 
earnest, be sincere. The stadium may be long or short, 
it may as it were be a mile, or half-a-mile, or 200 
yards — but the exceeding immortality — 'the dateless 
and irrevoluble circles of eternity ' — is for all who 
can say, " I have finished my race ; I have kept the 
faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of 
glory, which the Lord the Eighteous Judge, shall give 
me on that day." 

April 4, 1875. 



SEEMON XXIX. 
THE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS. 

Psalm lxiii. 1. 
" God, Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee." 

I endeavoured last Sunday to sketch for yon something 
of the history of the human conscience in its various 
phases of agitation and of peace. I wish this morning 
to urge upon you the grandeur and the happiness which 
result from an early devotion to the law of conscience ; 
I desire to show how sad is the loss of continuity in a 
pure and holy life ; — may my words, under the blessing 
of the Holy Spirit of God, enable you to realise the truth 
that not to have sinned is infinitely better than even, 
having sinned, to have been forgiven, — that a Paradise 
never wholly lost is transcendently sweeter than even a 
Paradise regained ! 

Each of us at birth is placed in a garden of Eden ; 
for each of us there grows in that garden a Tree of Life, 
and a Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil; it is 
possible for each of us even to the last to walk that 
garden with peaceful feet unterrified by the flaming sword. 
We cannot indeed do this — since we are very frail — 
by being absolutely sinless, as are the angels in heaven, 
"but we can do it by living, through God's grace, free 
from wilful, free from presumptuous, free from habitual, 



286 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

free from deadly sins. Yes, there have been some, — 
some like us, — some, not greater favourites of God than 
we, since God has no favourites, 1 — whose life, like a day 
which is golden to the last, has been spent, if not in 
the Paradise of faultless holiness, yet at least in the 
Paradise of an approving conscience, — in the Paradise 
of Peace with God. Some, the very happiest, the very 
divinest they, — but, alas ! not many. You know how 
often this evanescence of man's early hopefulness is 
touched upon in Holy Scripture. It is compared to 
seeds that do not bear ; — to trees whose leaf withereth ; — 
to blossoms that go up as dust ; — to the morning cloud 
that melteth ; — to the early dew that is exhaled. 2 And 
Literature too dwells frequently on this loss of Eden, — 
this falling of man from his first innocence. " There 
is," says one, " in every child of man an ideal primitive 
being which nature has designed with her most maternal 
hand, but which man too often strangles or corrupts." 3 
" From what have I not fallen," writes another, "if the 
child which I remember was indeed myself." 4 " Child- 
hood," says yet another, " is an everlasting promise which 
no man keeps." The most eloquent of English divines 
compares the beginning of such lives to a young trooper 
riding into battle blithe and gay, in all the bravery of 
soul and dress, and its end to the same soldier riding 
back, — weary, and stained, and wounded, — a defeated 
and shattered, man. 5 "How," says Shakespeare, 

" How like a younker, or a prodigal, 
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, 
Hugged and embraced by the strumpet wind 
How like a prodigal doth she return 
With overweathered ribs and ragged sails, 
Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind." 6 

1 ovk %<jti 7rpo(T0i>TTo\T]Trr7)s 6 6 60s, Acts x. 34. 

2 Matt. xiii. 22. Jude 12. Is. v. 24. Hos. vi. 4. 

3 Sainte-Beuve. 4 Charles Lamb. 

5 Bishop Jer. Taylor. 6 Merchant of Venice, ii. 6. 



xxix.] THE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS. 287 



We come, says Wordsworth, with the splendour of 
heaven about our infancy, but it grows less and less 
bright as we pass from childhood to boyhood, and from 
boyhood to youth, until 

" At last the man beholds it die away, 
And fade into the light of common day. " 1 

Now of course these utterances and illustrations of 
Scripture and of literature would be worse than useless 
if they were not drawn from, and founded on, the com- 
mon facts of life. But, alas ! the facts to which they 
allude are only too common. There is but too rarely in 
life that noble continuity, — that continuity of goodness, 
— which at least in Christian lands we might expect. 
For what do we see ? Some there are — let us hope the 
very fewest — who seem to be radically contemptible : 
their infancy wayward, their boyhood corrupt, their 
manhood infamous ; as soon as they are born, they go 
astray and speak lies. 2 But infinitely more common 
than these are men whose lives are not wholly bad, but 
discontinuous. Like the Joash and Manasseh of Scrip- 
ture, like the Nero or Henry VIII. of history, they 
begin well ; they show early signs of modesty and 
humility, and generosity and self-restraint ; but, as life 
advances, star by star, every early virtue seems to expire 
from their souls, and to leave them in the midnight of 
wasted lives and guilty hearts. Or else, on the contrary, 
they begin badly ; they waste their boyhood, they stain 
their manhood, nor are they perhaps converted till they 

1 Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of 
early Childhood. 

2 Comp. Shakspeare, K. Rich. III. , act iv. sc. 4 : 

" Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy ; 
Thy schooldays desperate, frightfnl, wild, and furious ; 
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and vsnturou 
Thine age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody 



288 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. 

have terribly imperilled the possibilities of earthly 
happiness, — like St Augustine, like Ignatius Loyola, like 
John Bunyan, — saved indeed, but so as by fire. But 
beside these three classes, some, thank God ! there are, 
whose lives of unbroken holiness have been like a 
summer dawn, which broadens unclouded into the bound- 
less day. 1 Such a life — growing in wisdom and stature 
and favour with God and man — was lived, for our ex- 
ample, in the shop of the village carpenter at Nazareth 
by the Son of God on earth ; and such, " as the flower 
of roses in the spring of the year, as lilies by the rivers 
of water," have been the lives of some of the sweetest 
of his earthly children. Such, — trained to faithfulness 
from infancy, 2 — was Timotheus, the young and gentle 
companion of St. Paul. Such was the holy St, Anthony, 
who, at an age not much older than the eldest of you, 
retired from a world hopelessly corrupt to serve God 
in the desert solitudes. Such was the wise St. Benedict, 
who, when not much older than even the youngest of 
you, subdued every evil impulse of his nature by prayer 
and fasting in his mountain cell. Such was St. Louis of 
France, who, not in the cell or in the desert, but in 
courts of kings and the camp of crusaders, lived worthy 
of that sainted mother who said that she would rather 
see him dead at her feet than know that he had 
committed a mortal sin. 3 Such were St. Thomas of 
Aquinum, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and St. Edmund 
of Canterbury, and our own Edward VI. of England, 
and many and many another whose names, known or 
unknown on earth, are written for ever in the Lamb's 
book of life. There was no violent break in the 
life of these men ; — no wasted opportunities to be 

i Prov. iv. 18. 2 2 Tim. i. 5. 

3 Blanche of Castile (Tillemont, Vie de SI. -Louis). 



xxix.] THE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS. 289 

toiled after ; no years which, the locust had eaten to be 
restored; — no lost virtues to be recovered; — no ha- 
bitual vices to be unlearnt. And this is the life at 
which you, who are still young, should aim; this is 
the only safe, the only happy life; the only life fit 
for children of the light ; the only life worthy of our 
high vocation ; the only life which fulfils the Saviour's 
precept, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is 
perfect." 1 

And this surely is the very object of your training 
at a school which, before and above all other things, 
m'ist be a Christian school. It is, so far as we can, 
to teach you from the first to do God's will, not your 
own, until God's will is your own; — to do, not what you 
lik-3, but what you ought, till ought and like are identical ; 
— to act not as you wish, but as you will, until what you 
will to do, because it is right, is also what you wish to 
do, because it is sweet ; — to do your duty when it is hard 
until, in small things as well as great, by habit, and by 
instinct, and by second nature, it becomes to you as easy 
as it is always blessed. Yes ! this is what, if we be not 
faithless to our high vocation, we should teach; — this 
is what, if you be not faithless to the lessons of your 
boyhood, you should learn, until the best description of 
your life, spent as God would have it spent, shall be 
this, — "They will go from strength to strength, and 
unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in 
Sion." 2 

I Nov/ I know well that this is not the rule, or the 
maxim, or the idea of the world. The world is full of 
base and foolish proverbs upon this subject : and more 
and more I notice with indignation amid our recent 
literature books which, with I know not what sickly and 

1 Matt. v. 48. 2 Ps. lxxxiv. 7. 

M.S. U 



290 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

sensual eloquence, are trying secretly and surreptitiously 
to preach some devil's gospel that sin is not sin, nor 
corruption corruption, nor shame shame. I see with 
indignation in some recent books what I can only call 
an Hellenic taint — some poisonous exhalation from the 
buried infamies of the past — the subtle treachery of 
an ill-concealed corruption. You, elder boys, be not 
deceived. Would you linger by the stagnant pool 
because its surface is filmed with the iridescence of 
decay ? would you make your home in the barren and 
burning desert, because its lying mirage has a charm ? 
Is a cheek beautiful because it wears the flush of 
drunkenness or the hectic of consumption? If you 
would be Christians — and if not it were better for 
you at once to die — if you would be anything but 
corrupt and bad, spurn, I pray you, with execration this 
would-be wisdom which is earthly, sensual, devilish ; 1 
— this insinuation, which would have made a good 
pagan blush, about the permissibility of wickedness, 
and the sinlessness of sin. There is but one rule for 
you, but one rule of safety and of happiness, and it is 
this : " Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go 
not in the way of evil men." 2 No sophistry can teach 
you to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles; no 
philosophy has the secret of touching pitch and not 
being defiled, or fire and not being burned. Suffer your- 
self to be deluded on this point by the mocking irony of 
the powers of evil, and you shall be untaught indeed, 
but it can only be by bitter experience. As the Cornish 
proverb says, " He who will not be ruled by the rudder, 
must be ruled by the rock." 



1 (To<pta . . . iiriyeios xj/vxwn SaifjLovidbdris. James iv. 1 5. 

2 Pror. iv. 14. 



xxix.] THE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS. 291 

So then I repeat to you that, as 

" The white stone, unfractured, ranks as most precious, 
The blue lotos, unblemished, has the sweetest perfume, " * 

so the soul which has never wilfully tampered with sin 
is God's most beautiful creation. The subject is so 
large that my treatment of it has been necessarily 
fragmentary and incomplete, and I fear even that you 
may not have understood me, but let me, for a moment 
or two longer, illustrate to you this truth on ground not 
often trodden in sermons. There are two great men, 
the very greatest among all our writers, a contrast of 
whose lives will perhaps make you remember the lesson 
which this morning I have tried to teach. Those two 
are Shakespeare and Milton. And here let no idolatry 
of Shakespeare's oceanic genius blind us to a lesson 
which his own nobleness of heart would have been the 
first to urge. It is not that we little natures are seeking 
to dwarf the greatness of a lofty soul, which, with all 
its errors, was perhaps transcendently better as well as 
transcendently greater than our own ; but it is that the 
very greatest, in proportion to their greatness, would 
most wish us to learn the lesson of their lives. Nov/ 
there were in the life and conduct of Shakespeare very 
noble elements of calm and self-respect, and elevation 
and moral insight, on which, ifctime permitted, it would 
be a happiness to dwell, and when we read that faithful 
and humble passage of his last will—/ commend my 
soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping, and 
assuredly believing, through the merits of Jesus Christ 
my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting — 

1 The Sorrows of Horn, a Chinese Tragedy (Quart. Review, lxxxi. 
p. 85). 

u 2 



292 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

we are reminded of his own words about the great 
statesman-Cardinal, that 

u Then, and not till then, he felt himself, 
And found the blessedness of being little ; 
And, to add greater honors to his age 
Than man could give him — he died fearing God." 1 

And yet there is enough, and, alas ! more than enough, 
in Shakespeare's writings, to show that he had not 
passed through life unscathed; to show that His soul 
had not escaped the tinge of corruption ; to show that 
when he exclaims so earnestly — 

* ' Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart," 2 — 

he was not thinking of himself. His sonnets, alas ! are 
not the only poems which make us tremble lest " out of 
the grave of Shakespeare's genius should start the ghost 
of Shakespeare's guilt." He could see the divineness of 
human purity ; he knew well the beauty of moral self- 
restraint; he could be kindled to the white heat of 
moral indignation ; he could say, even of the favourite 
creation of his own fancy : — 

" I know thee not, old man ; — fall to thy prayers ; 
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester ! 
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man, 
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane ; 
But being awake I do despise my dream. 
* * * • * * 

Keply not to me with a fool-born jest, 

Presume not that I am the thing I was ; 

For Heaven doth know, so shall the world perceive, 

That I have turned away my former self." 3 

But it would be very idle and very false to say that he 
was always thus true to his own self, always thus 

1 K. Henry VIII. , act. iv. sc. 2. 2 Hamlet, act iii. sc. 2. 

3 King Henry IV., Part'IL, act v. sc. 5. 



xxix.] TEE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS. 293 

faithful to that which is pure and honourable, and 
lovely, and of good report ? And if I judge him rightly 
in his greatness, I think that, when he had risen into 
the light of God's truth and love, when he had learnt 
in his heart, no less than with his intellect, how sacred 
and divine is the blush of modesty on a young human 
cheek, — when God's pity had come like a dewy twilight 
"to close the oppressive splendour of his day/' — then, 
feeling in the depths of a heart that even in its failures 
had never ceased to see its God, how infinitely grander 
and more permanent was the moral law than is the 
most dazzling glory of man, he would have been glad 
to resign the fame of having written Hamlet and King 
Lear for the Paradise of having never known the guilt 
of the unfaithful ; and that he, like the very greatest of 
his English predecessors, Chaucer, the bright herald of 
English song, would have wept bitter tears for every 
evil word that he had penned, and would have wished 
his very name obliterated rather than that thought or 
memory of him should make one soul care less for 
virtue, @r shrink less from sin. 1 

And therefore it is — though I have but a moment to 
dwell on it — therefore it is that in its unity, in its 
lofty dignity, in its vestal purity, in its sunlike path 
of unswerving and undaunted consistency, the life of 
Milton, with all its blindness, and its poverty, and 
its unsuccess, and its persecutions, seems to me, 

1 No one who knows Chaucer will hesitate to admit with Wordsworth 
that " if Chancer is sometimes a coarse moralist, he is still a great one." 
Many passages of the noblest and holiest purport might be quoted from 
his poems. Yet he expresses contrition for such of his writings as 
u sounen unto sin, and prays Christ of His mercy to forgive him for 
the guilt he had incurred thereby. " " He is said to have cried out 
repeatedly on his death-bed, * Woe is me that I cannot recall and annul 
these things ! but, alas ! they are continued from man to man, and I 
cannot do what I desire. 5 " — Southey. 



294 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

in its continuity of goodness, a finer poem, and one 
of God's own inspiring, than ever the intellect of 
Shakespeare conceived. No "Wild oats theory" no 
familiarity with wickedness, no indifferent tampering 
with evil, no varnishing of bad passions with the thin 
and poisonous f veneer of sham philosophy, could have 
produced such a man as this. He has himself told us 
in grave and strong language the ideal and theory of 
his life. That ideal — and would to God that some of 
you were brave and firm and highminded enough to 
adopt it too — was this : — It was, even as a boy, to make 
labour and intent study his portion in this life ;* it was 
to draw his inspiration from " devout prayer to that 
Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and 
knowledge, and sends out His seraphim with the hal- 
lowed fire of His altar to touch and purify the lips of 
whom He pleases ; " 2 it was to encourage in his own 
soul such an honest haughtiness of innocence and self- 
respect as to render it impossible to him to sink and 
plunge into the low descents of unlawful degradations ; 
it was even without the oath of knighthood to be born 
with the free and gentle spirit of the Christian knight f 
it was to cherish that fine reservedness of natural dis- 
position and moral discipline, which, from his very 
boyhood, should bring home to his inmost soul the 
truth, that, "the body is for the Lord, and the Lord 
for the body." And I say that if, as Milton's latest 
biographer has imagined the scene, 4 this pure and 
noble youth, with these high theories of life, had 
stepped into one of those tavern-meetings of wild wits 

1 Milton, Reason of Church Government (Works, ed. Mitford, iii. 
141). Again in his Apology he speaks of " the wearisome labours and 
studious watehings in which I have spent and lived out almost whole 
youth. " 2 Works, iii. 148. * Apology, dec. (Works, iii. 271). 

4 Masson's Life of Milton, ii. 404. 



xxix.] THE CONTINUITY OF GODLINESS 295 

and careless livers among whom the less happy Shake- 
speare passed his days — had he hushed those loose 
jests, and that unseemly talking, with the grave rebuke 
that " he who would not be frustrate of his hope to 
write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himselfe 
to bee a true Poem, that is, a composition and patterne 
of the best and honorablest things," * — I say that if the 
young Milton, in the gravity of a faithful and high- 
thinking innocence, had appeared among them and 
spoken thus, some might have laughed, and some 
resented, and some have blushed, but I read the 
greatest of human intellects very wrongly if, as he 
gazed on that bold youth, there would not have been 
in the eyes of Shakespeare a light of silent tears, and 
in the soul of Shakespeare a pang of sadness, a prayer 
of penitence, as his heart went sorrowing through all 
that faultful part. 

Yes, because " there is an inevitable congruity 
between the tree and its fruit:" yes, because "he who 
would lay up for his mature years a store of that great 
virtue of magnanimity, which should look the whole 
world in the face unabashed, and dare to do the noblest 
things he has ever thought, that man must begin by 
preserving for himself from his earliest youth, and in 
the most secret sessions of his memory, a spotless title 
to self-respect." 2 It is then to " this hill-top of sanctity 
and goodness, above which there is no other ascent but 
to the love of God," 3 that I would lead your footsteps, 
that I would turn your eyes. It may be that you will 
sin ; and if so, assuredly you will suffer ; and then you 
may repent, or you may not repent; and then will 
come what comes hereafter. But there is one lesson 

1 Apology, &c. (Works, iii. 270). 2 Masson's Milton, ubi supra. 
3 Milton, Works, iii. 167. 



296 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. xxix. 

which, if you learn it, shall be as much more to you 
than all other lessons, as Eternity is more than Time — 
it is to " keep innocency, and take heed to that which is 
right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last ; " it is 
to say now, and as boys at school, as the one steady 
purpose and inspiration of a life spent in the con- 
tinuity of holiness — God, Thou art my God : early 
will I seek TJiee ; it is to take Christ as your Captain 
even now, in your earliest years, and following the 
divine and perfect example, to be from the first iv tql$ 
tov ITarpo?, in your Father's House, and about your 
Father's business — to grow in wisdom and stature, and 
favour with God and man. 

October 12, 1873. 



SERMON XXX. 
HOW TO BESIST THE DEVIL. 

1 Pet. v. 8. 

" Be sober, be vigilant ; because your adversary the devil, as a roar- 
ing lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour : whom resist 
stedfast in the faith." 

So speaks the Epistle of to-day. " Resist the devil and 
he will flee from von." Such is the warning and the 
promise of this evening's Second Lesson. " Get thee 
behind Me, Satan." Such, as the eternal defiance for 
all His children, was the answer to the tempter of 
our Saviour Christ. 

I am not going to speak for a moment of what is 
called the personality of the tempter. "Whether there 
be indeed an evil spirit, who, walking this world unseen, 
finds the delight of a detestable malignity in corrupting 
the soul of man, and sometimes by fleshly impulses, 
sometimes by worldly ambitions, sometimes by sins 
which seem apart from both, teaches man to destroy 
himself and to defy his God ; or whether, on the other 
hand, these impulses, these seductions, these subtle and 
violent depravities, are the inevitable consequences of 
man's double nature and man's unfettered will ; on 
either of these suppositions, the facts of our life remain 
the same, equally incapable of theoretical explanation, 
equally momentous in practical significance. It is of this 



298 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

practical significance that I alone would speak, and I do 
so in the intense desire that God may bring home my 
words to your hearts, and by leading you to be more sober 
and watchful, may thereby make you more holy, and so 
more happy in your life here, more sure hereafter to 
inherit that blessedness which eye hath not seen nor ear 
heard, but which God will give to all them that seek 
Him in sincerity and truth. 

II. I am speaking to tempted souls ; every preacher in 
every church in England is speaking this day to tempted 
souls. The forms of the temptation may be very diffe- 
rent ; the difficulty with which you have to wrestle in 
life may be wholly different from that of the boy 
who sits next to you. Though the seven deadly sins 
have close affinities with one another, they do not equally 
tempt the same heart. And yet, by one or other of these 
— by pride and anger, by profanity or disobedience, by 
sloth or covetousness, by dishonesty or lust — by one or 
other in the perilous list of temptations — to one or 
other, in the dark catalogue of sins — we all are tempted. 
But it is one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall. 
A temptation is not a sin. " Sentire tentationem" to be 
strongly tempted, is common to every one of us ; " consen- 
tire tentationi" to be guilty of wickedness, need be the 
misery of none. The devil may suggest, but until sug- 
gestion has become acceptance we are still innocent. 
A flash of rage instantly checked ; a pang of envy at 
once crushed down into the heart ; an evil image and an 
impure thought, hardly present to the consciousness, 
till, like the viper on the apostle s hand, it is shaken off 
into the flame of our own moral indignation ; anything 
that degrades us instantly flung away from us with every 
nerve and fibre of the strong and faithful soul — these are 
not sins. You may sometimes see a little black cloud 



xxx.] HOW TO BESIST THE DEVIL. 299 

on some summer's day, a few hundred feet above the 
earth, instantly dissipated * by glorious sunbeams, or 
dashed into beneficent rain ; well, such a cloud leaves 
no stain on the blue illimitable sky. When there is a 
swaying of the heart, when there is a yielding in the 
will, when there is a cherishing of the guilty purpose — 
then and then only does temptation become sin. To all 
of us, to the very best and noblest — the devil will 
suggest. Scarcely a day, perhaps, in which he will not 
come in some guise or other ; it may be with plausible 
insinuations and lying promises, all glitter and fascina- 
tion, as, rustling through the fallen leaves of the for- 
bidden tree, he crept upon the careless hour of Eve ; it 
may be in sudden assaults of overwhelming passion, a 
lion with flaming eye and thundering roar, as he came 
bounding and crashing upon David's soul; it may be 
disguised like an angel of light, with subtle perversion 
of vices, which look half akin to virtues, as he stole in 
the wilderness upon the weary and fasting Christ : but 
oh, remember this, whether he come in stealth or in 
fury — with honeyed whisper or with fierce threat — with 
the murderer's dagger or with the liar's mask — in one 
way or other " Satan desires to have you that he may sift 
you as wheat." Every one of you will be placed under 
that winnowing foot of the devil ; every one of you sub- 
jected to searching, piercing, exploring power, by which 
sin will find you out, and compel you, perhaps in shame 
and ignominy, to show what you are. Well, when the devil 
thus comes to you, remember this : not to resist is agony 
and ruin ; to resist is possible, and may be easy ; the 
means of resistance are sobriety and watchfulness ; the 
end of resistance is certain victory — resist the devil and 
he will flee from you. 

III. How and when to resist — it is on this subject 



300 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

that I want to give you one or two plain hints. And 
the very first and most important of all which should 
press upon you is, resist the devil inwardly ; resist him 
in your own heart ; for far, far more easily is the out- 
ward enemy resisted if the inward man be not laid 
waste. You know how Scripture dwells on this. " My 
son, give me thy heart." "Keep thine heart with all 
diligence, for out of it are the issues of life/' u Out of 
the heart proceed evil thoughts," — and then all the rest. 
" Who can say I have made my heart pure, I am cleansed 
from my sin?" Alas! one alone— our Saviour Jesus — 
could say it absolutely; by the grace of His Holy 
Spirit His saints and children have at all times been 
able, in their measure, to say it too. And there are 
two reasons why it is of infinite importance. The one 
is that the guilty heart is in itself a source of anguish. 
In the great romance Vathek, if I remember rightly, 
enters the Hall of Eblis, and there sees the spirits of 
evil seated in splendour at a banquet, on thrones of gold, 
yet over the brow of each there pass spasms of agony ; 
and when he would know the cause, one of them pushes 
aside from his own breast the purple robe, and lays his 
finger beside his heart ; and there, about the heart, there 
plays in gnawing torture a perpetual flame. The sinner's 
heart is like that ; if he be only a secret apostate, not 
an open evil-doer, the flame is there. Not infrequently 
the restraints of society, the dread of detection, the ter- 
ribleness of consequences, the absence of possibility — 
even it may be some shred of compunction and natural 
horror, saves v a man from the actual commission of a 
sin; he may die almost in the odour of sanctity, and 
yet all the while may have been in secret sacrificing to 
devils, and selling his immortal soul for a nothing — a 
fancy — or it might have been a consuming desire, which 



xxx.] BOW TO BESIST THE DEVIL. 301 

has continued unfulfilled, so that his wish of wickedness 
has been like that stolen robe which Achan would have 
worn, but never did, and which was consumed with him 
to ashes under that heap of hurled stones and burning 
fire which marked the thief s burial-place in Achor's vale. 
The interpretation which Christ gave of the sixth and of 
the seventh commandments show too fatally that the 
thought of wickedness is sin ; but how often is it that 
the thought of wickedness only continues to be a thought 
of wickedness ? How often does the black fountain of 
the inwardly bad heart not break forth in the black 
torrent of the outwardly bad life ? How often does he 
who wilfully thinks of evil, not wish for evil, not purpose 
evil, not commit evil ? Scarcely, alas ! ever. It is 
easiest of all to resist Satan at this stage of evil thought. 
But if you do not, if you give him 77-01) arco, if you yield 
to him this leverage, he will with it upheave the temple 
of your soul from its very foundations. He will not 
necessarily do it with violence. He will but drop the 
bad seed in the little cranny of the wall, or the little 
neglected crevice on the temple floor, and just as you 
may see the pestilent elder-trees have done in more 
than one old wall of this college, silently and day by 
day it will enlarge its dwelling-place, until it will break 
the starred mosaic, or split the solid masonry with its 
mere natural growth. How easy it would have been to 
crush that seed, or at the worst to pluck up that little 
seedling by the roots ! But the bare thought grows first 
into the strong imagination, then into the evil motion, 
last into the perilous consent ; and so, little by little, 
it gains in strength, and little by little it is met by 
feebler resistance, or at last by none at all. 

IV. My first suggestion, then, to you is, resist in- 
wardly ; and my second is like it, for it is, resist step 



'302 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

by step. The heathen poet here chimes in with the 
preacher. 

" Obsta principiis : sero medicina paratur." 

Eesist the beginnings of evil ; a mere remedy is all too 
late. If you have not resisted at the stage of thought, 
then summon every power of your soul to resist at the 
stage of the act. Fight inch by inch ; fight step by 
step ; — if not at the thought, then at the act ; if not at 
the act, then at the habit ; if not even at the habit, 
then, at least, at the frightful surrender — the utter 
massacre of the last defenders of all that is holy ox 
pure within you. But bear in mind that each stage of 
the losing battle is more perilous, more difficult than 
the last. It is easier to frighten the enemy than to rout 
him by a charge ; easier to rout than to await his onset ; 
easier to defeat him then than to recover one lost inch of 
ground ; easier to recover an inch than to rally finally 
the demoralised and broken troops. There is more hope 
for a boy who may have had bad thoughts than for one 
who has let them pass into bad words ; and more hope 
for bad words than for bad deeds ; and more hope again 
for him who hath sinned once than for him who has 
sinned twice, and for the sinner of a week than for the 
sinner of a month. Oh, if any of you have lost the 
drawbridge, in God's name drive back the enemy from 
the wall ; if he has reached the wall, fight for the 
portcullis ; if he has carried the portcullis, rally every 
shattered power and wounded energy, and die rather 
than admit him at the gate. And don't have any truce 
or any parleys ; don't stop even to bury your dead. 
Your enemy hates you, and he is as false as he is 
deadly. He will say, " Only this once. You are tired of 
fighting ; give me the fortress only now, I promise you 



xxx.] HOW TO BESIST THE DEVIL. 303 

that I will evacuate it whenever you like ; if not, at any 
rate you can at any time drive me out. 

" Be mine and Sin's for one short hour ; others 
Be aU thy life the happiest man of men." 

Oh, do not believe him ! He is a liar from the begin- 
ning. A boy may be tempted to lie, to steal, to 
wrong his neighbour, to indulge some bad passion, and 
thinks that " once " cannot matter. Oh, pause ! That 
one sin — is it not the trickling rill, which must become the 
bounding torrent, the broad river, the waste, troubled, 
discoloured sea ? You drop a stone out of your hand : 
is it not the very law of gravitation that, if it falls 
twelve feet the first second, it will fall forty-eight feet 
the next second, and 108 feet the third second, and 300 
feet the fifth second ; and that, if it fall for ten seconds — 
do you know how many feet of air in that last second 
it will have rushed through ? In that last second it 
will have rushed through 1200 feet, till earth stops it. 
Even with that prodigiously increasing momentum, 
even with that rushing acceleration of velocity, is the 
increase and multiplication of unchecked sin ; — and too 
often it falls on and on, until it is dashed to shivers on 
the rock of death. 

V. But, as a last warning, it seems sometimes that 
the spirits of evil, as though to induce a fatal security, 
as though to lull a wholesome alarm, — attack the 
soul, not coarsely and openly, but gently, caressingly, 
gradually, insidiously. There are times when the devil 
comes upon us, not with the insinuated apostasy, but 
with the quoted Scripture ; not with the gross offer, but 
the subtle treason ; not as a raging enemy, but as the 
soft, smiling, flattering, caressing friend. Souls there 
are which have been overwhelmed, not by the beating 



304 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of waves and storms, but the noiseless stealing as of 
the muddy tide upon the coasts of Lancashire, " always 
shallow, yet always just high enough to drown." Oh 
beware the devil when he steals upon you in the normal 
tone of a surrounding society, or still worse in the 
pleasant guise of a would-be friend. There may be a 
companion whom you are inclined to like; whose 
society is pleasant to you ; to whom you feel greatly 
drawn, or by whose notice you, being younger or smaller, 
are flattered ; — well if, after a very short time, you get 
to see that, however plausible, he is not a good boy, — 
not a boy who will do you any good, — that his influ- 
ence over you, — that which subtly, by look, and word, 
and deed, flows in upon your soul from his — is weaken- 
ing all that is best and purest in you, and hardening all 
that is worst — then, most of all, be sober, be vigilant, — 
then most of all resist a gradual, an insidious, attack. 
Which is best, that you should cast off your bad friendship, 
or that you should lose your immortal soul ? It cannot 
be that there are none with whom you can enjoy that 
blessed and beautiful thing, a free, pure, noble, natural 
school friendship, — a thing as blessed and beautiful as a 
low and sneaking friendship is leprous and accursed. 
But even if it were not so, better utter loneliness than 
evil communications; — better to be a friendless boy 
than to dwell in Mesech, and have your habitation 
among the tents of Kedar. But, as I have often warned 
you, since it is the case that the worst of all tempters 
are often human tempters, how fearful is the guilt alike 
of the instability which passively acts as a temptation 
to the strong, or of the wickedness which dares to take 
the tempter's office and to sacrifice the weak! And 
whether for strong or weak, what guilt to turn into a 
source of mutual degeneracy that happy companionship 



xxx.] HOW TO BESIST THE DEVIL. 305 

between friend and friend which God's mercy meant 
for a mutual safeguard and an inestimable boon ! 

VI. There then are three hints meant alike for 
the youngest of you, and for the eldest. Eesist in the 
heart; resist step by step ; resist insidious attacks, no 
less than sudden attacks. And, in one word more, 
resist soberly, watchfully : — soberly, because even 
that which is lawful is not always expedient; watch- 
fully, because the assault may come violently at 
any moment, may be coming imperceptibly at every 
moment. However it comes, you will, some day, find 
yourself in tangible manner, face to face with the 
awful final choice between good* and evil; and when a 
soul's destiny hangs trembling and wavering, then even 
the mere dust in the balance may decide the death- 
ful dipping of the scale. So that all which you have 
heard is very practical; oh, when you leave this chapel, 
will you take pity on yourselves, will you make it 
practical. And as, at once, the fiery darts begin to fall on 
you — perhaps this very day to fall on you, — will you 
hold up against them the shield of faith, will you wield 
against him who hurls them the Spirit's sword ? If so, 
you are safe. The other day an English clergyman 
visited the two fine ships which have just sailed on their 
voyage of Arctic discovery into the land of snow and 
darkness; and he found the brave captain full of confi- 
dence ; and raising his eyes in the cabin, he saw there, 
as almost its only ornament, an illuminated text ; and 
the text was, Have faith in God ! "Ah, there," he said, 
pointing to the text, "there is the true pole !" We like to 
think of those gallant men carrying with them into the 
cold and midnight that faith, that hope; it is a faith 
which will lighten their darkness more than the stars 
that glitter over the floes of ice; it is a hope which will 

M.S. x 



306 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. xxx. 

make the heavens glow with a more vivid splendour, than 
the Aurora which flushes the fields of snow. Take with 
you that faith, that hope : you too may sail hereafter, in 
your little boat of life, into the cold, into the hunger, 
into the darkness, into the exploration of unknown 
hopes. Gigantic powers will fight against you there, 
more terrible than the midnight, more paralysing than 
the northern cold. N^aTe, yprjyoprjcraTe. Be sober, 
be vigilant ; have faith in God and in His Son our Lord 
Jesus Christ, and He will give you the victory; resist 
the devil, and he will flee from you. 

Jwie 12, 1875. 



SEKMON XXXI. 
HO L LIDA Y ADVICE. 

Mark vi. 31, 

" And He said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert 
place, and rest awhile.' ' 

After another term, — another of these epochs of school 
life which pass so rapidly, which seem so short, and 
yet of which each one is so fraught with infinite issues 
of possibility for the health of souls and the happiness of 
lives — the holidays are now close at hand. We are going 
to enjoy a period of rest (or, which is the same things 
since mere rest can never satisfy a reasonable being 
for more than a very short time) — of changed scenes, and 
of changed endeavours, which many of" us need, and 
from which I hope we all shall profit. Those who have 
deserved it most thoroughly will enjoy it most entirely. 
To talk of rest when there has been no work is a 
mockery — it is then a pleasure we have no right to, — a 
reward we have not earned ; and it will then be as 
little refreshful as is the sleep of night to one who has 
yawned and slept through half the day. But I believe 
sincerely that all, or very nearly all, of you have earned 
the rest fairly ; and when this is the case, how delightful 
the holidays are ! I think that of the rare unmingled 
pleasures which life has to offer, few are to be compared, 

x 2 " 



S08 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



in sweetness and intensity, to the summer holidays of a 
good boy in a happy home. The mere joy of going home ; 
the-, ever-brightening consciousness of the glad reception 
that awaits us there ; the sense of mute regard and 
unchanged friendship in each familiar object as it flashes 
into sight — the bridge, the river, the village, the church,- 
thet, smiling faces of those who have known us from 
childhood, the dear old house nestling in its ancestral 
trees, the nursery where we slept, the garden where we 
played as little children when there were none who did 
not love us, the father's welcome, the mother's kiss — 
the eager visit to each well-remembered nook, the well- 
earned prize to be shown with so much pleasure, the 
plans for many long, long happy days — even those 
tender touches of sadness in the sunshine, the well- 
remembered portrait of some dear dead face, the church- 
yard where the green sod and the cross of flowers mark 
a little brother's or a little sister's grave — every silent, 
every voiceful appeal to that which each of us has in 
him of purest and sweetest — well, as he contemplated 
these, might the poet sing : — 

" Ah, dear delights, that o'er my soul, 
On Memory's wing-like shadows fly ; 
Ah, flowers that Joy from Eden stole, 
While Innocence stood laughing by." 

II. Now God forbid that in one word which I shall 
say I should darken by the faintest shadow of a shade — 
were it even but as the shadow of a bird's wing as it flits 
across the summer noon — this, which for every good, 
high-minded, true-hearted boy may be one of the 
brightest and purest of life's joys. Clouds for every 
one of you, as life goes on, will gather fast enough over 
the sunlight, and ever longer and longer mil the 
inevitable shadows of the evening fall; but he who 



xxxi.] HOLIDAY ADVICE. 309 

hao known rightly how to use the innocent sunshine 
while it lasted, knows, at his darkest hour, that the great 
sun is still shining, though it be scarfed by earthly 
vapours or hidden behind the shadow of the world. I 
love happiness. I believe in happiness. I am sure 
that God meant us for happiness. I think that we are 
all the better for happiness. I long that every one of 
you should be as happy as God gives it to any of His 
children to be. And though mere pleasure is a far 
lower thing, I do not even look with a dubious eye 
on pleasure. I know that many turn it into a Marah 
fountain, scorching and poisonous ; but I know too that 
innocence can sweeten it. Ho good man can be a foe 
to happiness ; no good man need be a foe to innocent 
pleasure. God meant us to have something of both ; 
and the better we are, the more generous, the more 
pure, the more unselfish, the more we shall have of 
both. For there is but one form of happiness which 
can long satisfy the soul which God has made. It is 
when happiness is not sought at all for its own sake, 
but comes as the natural law of a noble existence ; it 
is when duty and delight are synonymous and coinci- 
dent ; it is when peace is the reward of faithfulness, 
not the aim of self-indulgence ; it is when gladness is 
found in the service of others, not in the satisfaction of 
self ; it is when the psalm of life is, ." Lo, I come to do 
Thy will, my God. I am content to do it ; yea, Thy 
law is within my heart." 

" Who follows pleasure, pleasure slays, 
God's wrath upon himself he wreaks ; 
But all delights attend his days 
Who takes with thanks, but never seeks. " 

And this is what our Lord Himself intended when He 
said, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His 



310 IN THE DAYS OF TEY YOUTH. [seem. 

righteousness, and all other things shall be added unto 
you." I would try to make your rest more enjoyable, by 
being spent but as a prelude of that rest which remaineth 
for the people of God. I would wish your homes to be 
yet dearer, as being but dim reflections of the home in 
heaven. " Blessed are they that are thus homesick, for 
they shall come at last to their Father's house." You 
are entering on a rest — I would make the rest more 
enjoyable. 

III. I would ask you then during these holidays, and 
indeed always, to bear in mind that all life is an 
education. I use the word not of books, not of science, 
not of languages, but in its very widest sense, of that 
wisdom which is far loftier than knowledge, because it 
is health of mind, and self-content, and well-directed 
industry, and perfect kindliness. The true education of 
life — and, for all we know, it may go on even beyond 
the grave — is never attained until the awful, eternal 
difference between right and wrong is fully, finally, 
personally, practically, irrevocably learned. Alas ! the 
experience of every day teaches us that the lesson, 
which looks so simple, is in reality terribly difficult ; at 
all times, I fear, and especially in youth, we get easily 
confused in our judgments about wrong-doing ; easily 
blunted in the edge of our moral sense ; easily apt to 
estimate the seriousness of sin, only by the gravity of 
its consequences, not by the fatality of its nature. " I 
saw in Eome," says a modern writer, " an old coin, a 
silver denarius, all coated and crusted with green and 
purple rust. I called it rust, but I was told that it was 
copper ; the alloy thrown out from the silver until there 
was none left within, the silver was all pure. It takes 
ages to do it, but it does get done. Souls are like that. 
Something moves in them slowly, till the debasement is 



xxxi.] HOLIDAY ADVICE. 311 

all thrown out. Some day perhaps the very tarnish 
shall be taken off." "Well, there is this alloy, this tarnish 
in all of us, and the education of life is to purge it all 
away; if we do not do this ourselves, God in mercy 
helps us to do it by sorrows, by disappointments, by 
failures, by judgments, 

" By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove 
And purge the silver ore adulterate." 

But to this wider education, all the narrower may tend. 
Moral growth, almost of necessity, involves intellectual 
growth. For though it needs no intellect to see the 
difference between right and wrong — though herein 
many a dull boy may be as good as gold, and many a 
clever boy may be weak, and loose, and bad, yet if only 
the heart be in the right place, the training of the mind 
has a double moral importance, not only as saving the 
soul from the many wretched temptations which idle- 
ness brings in its train, but also as deepening and 
strengthening the sense of right. A well-trained mind, 
a well-stored memory, a well-developed intellect will 
help to disentangle the soul from the fatal and subtle 
sophistries of sin. And if you would be happy you 
must not think that your education may cease for these 
seven weeks. They are far too long for anyone to 
waste, nor will they pass without leaving their mark 
upon you for good or for evil. Many a boy spoils his 
holidays — makes them a burden to himself and a weari- 
ness to his friends — by having nothing to do. A boy 
with nothing to do is at once miserable and disagreeable. 
But a sensible boy will never be without something to 
do ; and the hours of hearty play and vigorous exercise 
will come all the more freshly and delightfully if they 
be varied by good reading or honest work. And the 



312 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

holidays are especially a valuable time for removing 
that sad ignorance of your own literature — that blank 
unacquaintanee with the thoughts that breathe and 
words that burn — with all that glowing poetry and 
heart-ennobling eloquence in which your own language 
abounds. 

" "We must be free or die that speak the tongue 
That Shakespeare spoke ; the faith and morals hold 
That Milton held." 

To know souls like theirs — to understand them and 
enjoy them — is in itself an education, and a very 
liberal one. These strong and noble guardians, these 
beautiful and inspiring thoughts, will save the empty 
house of the mind from a thousand villainous and 
contemptible intruders — they will make you loftier, 
wiser, better, — at once more useful and more happy. If 
you are to do any high service in the world — and to 
do high service every one of you should aim — then, 
even in the holidays, add to your faith virtue, and to 
virtue knowledge. They are a trinity of gifts spiritual, 
of which the eternal unity is a heavenly wisdom. " You 
must not only listen, but read ; you must not only read, 
but think : knowledge without common sense is folly ; 
without method it is waste ; without kindness it is 
fanaticism ; without religion it is death/' 

IV. And remember that life is an education mainly 
that it may be also a service. You cannot realise too 
early and too wholly that we are not our own — that no 
man liveth to himself; that love is the divinest, the 
sweetest, the most comprehensive of all the virtues ; 
that if love to God be the motive, love to man is the 
main end and aim of all earthly existence. It is one of 
those simple principles which should be the guide of all 
life, and sins against it are very fatal. This is why charity 



xxxi.] HOLIDAY ADVICE. 313 

covereth a multitude of sins. This is why the most 
sternly terrible words which Christ ever spoke were words 
against those wretches who are not only sinners them- 
selves, but the direct wilful cause of sin in others. And 
you must not fancy that you can lay aside this view of 
life at home. Oh ! remember that as to father and to 
brother the most generous and manly services, so to 
mother and to sister the most chivalrous self-renounce- 
ment, the most delicate courtesies, are due. I do not 
suppose that any of you are boys of the low type who 
mainly think of home as a place for indulging in eating, 
and drinking, and laziness ; but I do know that some boys 
are very apt to think that at home they need take no 
trouble to be unselfish or agreeable. And how in such 
cases do discontent, fretfulness, little disobediences to 
parents, quarrels and bickerings between brothers and 
sisters, poison even the sweet charities of the home. 
Where thege are, home almost ceases to be. But the 
sweetest and happiest homes — homes to which men in 
weary life look back with yearnings too deep for tears — 
homes whose recollections lingers round our manhood 
like light, and the sunshine, and the sweet air, into 
which no base things can intrude — are homes where 
brethren dwell together in unity ; where because all love 
God, all love their brothers also ; where because all are 
very dear to all, each is dearer to each than to himself. 
V. And, lastly, as life is an education, and as life is a 
service, so too life is a struggle. The wheels of time 
will not stand still for you because you are at home ; 
nor will the powers of evil sleep. The great problems, 
the great trials, the great temptations of life will go on 
for you there as here. You will be away, indeed, from 
school, but you will not be away from yourselves. As 
the labour of Christ was a ceaseless effort for others, 



314 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

so remember that His very rest was a ceaseless prayer. 
What we have ever to bear in mind is this : that there 
is but one final and fatal evening to life, to beauty, to 
goodness, to happiness. It is sin. All our dangers, 
all our sorrows — every pang of remorse,* every ache of 
shame, every access of despair — comes from sin. It is 
sin that crowds the wards of the prison-house ; it is sin 
that throngs the cells of the asylum and goads the 
suicide to the river-bank ; it is sin which, when it stops 
far short of these desperate extremities, yet makes the 
heart gather blackness, and stains the path of life with 
tears. And how does sin thus gain a footing in human 
hearts ? Only in one of two ways — stealthy, insidious 
intrusion, or sudden, violent assault. Both attacks 
need equal watchfulness. When a Josiah degenerates, 
when a David murders, when a Peter blasphemes — j 
what does it mean ? Alas ! it means the same as when 
those who know what is right do what is wrong ; it 
means that their principles are not yet established ; it 
means that there is no depth of earth in the stony place 
where the good seed of teaching has fallen ; it means, 
in a word, that they have not yet learnt that life is 
an education and a struggle ; it means that they have 
slept when they should have watched; have been 
careless when they should have prayed. Even at home, 
even in the holidays, yea, even till the end of life, 
Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. 

VI. It only remains, on the one hand, to hope that 
all who return may, after a rest well earned and wisely 
spent, return here in health, in happiness, in good 
spirits, with high resolves, with loving, earnest hearts, 
to a diligent and prosperous term; and, on the other 
hand, to bid a very hearty and kind farewell to those 
who leave us. From every one of them we part in 



xxxi.] HOLIDAY ADVICE. 315 

perfect kindness ; from most with, sincere regret. And 
for those who have done their duty here and been 
blessed — those over whose happy years at school the 
blessing of God has fallen like a line of light — those 
who have learnt by glad experience the dignity of duty, 
the holiness of innocence, the happiness of work — we 
know that by God's grace we shall hear of them again 
with pride and pleasure. And if there be any who 
have not yet fully, bravely, wholly, learnt to refuse the 
evil and to choose the good, to them we say that there, 
at the Holy Table of the Lord — there, where side by side 
we shall kneel, all of us sinners, yet all of us redeemed — 
there, more than at any other spot on earth, is to be 
found for all who faithfully and humbly seek it, the 
pledge of past forgiveness, of present consolation, of 
future hope. For all of us alike, with the end of this 
term, will be shut and ended another volume, wherein 
is written by Time, the great transcriber, the history of 
ourselves. In two more days the last page will have 
been turned, the solemn finis written. 

" Whose hands shall dare to open and explore 
Those volumes, closed and clasped for evermore ? 
Not mine. "With reverential feet I pass, 
I hear a voice that cries * Alas ! Alas ! ' 
Whatever hath been written shall remain, 
Nor he erased, nor written o'er again ; 
The unwritten only still belongs to thee, 
Take heed, and ponder well, what that shall be." 

July 25, 1876. 



SERMON XXXII. 
BLAMELESS AND HABMLESS. 

Phil. ii. 15. 

"Blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke." 

I. These beautiful words are suggested to me by the 
conclusion of to-day's Epistle : they are an amplifica- 
tion of that word " blameless," which is there the most 
prominent conception. They seem no unfit subject for 
our morning thoughts. I do not desire to treat of them 
elaborately, or theologically. It is better that the 
passing thoughts, by which, week after week, we would 
lead you heavenwards, should be spontaneous and simple ; 
and very often I should rejoice if the text could be 
the only sermon ; if there were any means of engraving 
the text alone upon your hearts and consciences — more 
than content if so all else that is said, and he who says 
it, were alike forgotten. 

II. And I think you all will feel that these words — 
" blameless and harmless, the sons of God without 
rebuke "—are very exquisite words — words worthy to 
linger in our memory as with the music of a lyric song. 
They describe the most consummate of attainments — 
the loftiest of ideals. They are the brightest commen- 
tary on the exhortation, " Be ye perfect, even as your 
Father in heaven is perfect;" they are the finest 



sjsrm. xxxii.] BLAMELESS AND HARMLESS. 317 

description of what Jesus was, and of what the followers 
of Jesus ought to be. 

III. The word " blameless " means free from every 
form of wilful wrong or intentional misdoing against 
our fellow-men ; the word " harmless " means sincere, 
simple, without admixture of sin and vileness in the 
sight of God. To be the first is far, far the easier. It 
would not be so if the word "blameless" meant 
" unblamed ; " for no man, however blameless, can 
escape being blamed. The experience of ages has 
shown that the shield of innocence, which a good man 
carries with him through, the world, cannot be so white 
that none will throw dust at it. Some of the holiest 
and noblest men that ever lived have been — and some- 
times all through their lives — very targets for the 
arrows of abuse. So long as Envy has restless eyes, 
and Calumny a fertile imagination, and Malice a myriad 
of voices which bellow in the shade — so long will there 
be enemies, persecutors, and slanderers of the very 
saints of God. 

The stainless purity of Joseph saved him not from 
infamous accusations ; nor the noble meekness of Moses 
from bitter criticisms ; . nor the splendid services of 
Samuel from open ingratitude. Of the stern self- 
denial of John the Baptist they could say only, He hath 
a devil ; of the boundless sympathy of the Saviour of 
mankind, they dared to mutter, " Behold a glutton and 
a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." If 
ever we feel discouraged at the thought that there are 
natures which guilelessness fails to disarm, or unselfish- 
ness to win, let the Cross reveal to us the high lesson that 
we may still be utterly blameless, though it may be 
that we live no day unblamed. And if they have 
called the Master of the house Beelzebub, they have 



318 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [seem/ 

done the same to them of His household, and some of 
them have even 

" Stood pilloried on Infamy's high stage, 
And borne the pelting scorn of half an age." 

IV. Yet blamelessness is often recognised. In those 
school-reports which, term by term, pass in hundreds 
through my hands, and which we send home to your 
parents as our estimate of your conduct and character, 
I always observe with deep pleasure that the very large 
majority are favourable and good reports. Not a few of 
them are the warm expression of hearty praise. It is quite 
exceptional if any boy is singled out for censure as idle 
or unruly, as untrustworthy or corrupt. And now and 
then in these reports one comes across the word " blame- 
less ; " and it is a deep pleasure to be able to endorse 
it ; for of all characters it is the very highest that can 
be given, and the one which must most delight a 
parent's heart. If any of you have ever received that 
report — if any of you ever earn it hereafter — as I hope 
many of you will strive to do — be well assured that, 
since it is never lightly given, it shows you to have 
won the love and the confidence of those who are set 
over you. It means no mere negative character — no 
mere absence of overt misdoings. It would never be 
given to a conceited, or saturnine, or ill-conditioned 
boy, or .to one who is content with the superficial 
standard and the vulgar average. It would imply 
diligence, and purity, and faithfulness, and good influ- 
ence over others ; and that modest humility, that 
courteous sweetness, that happy geniality, that natural 
appreciation of all kindness, which are only found in 
the fairest dispositions, and which are to the nature of 
a boy like the very dew of God upon the opening 
flowers of life. And yet, though rare indeed are such 



xxxii.] BLAMELESS AND HABMLESS. 319 

giftk and graces, how far more easy is it to be thus 
"blameless to men, than to be harmless — aicepaios — un- 
mixed with any taint of evil, before God. For 
this is innocence — this is holiness. It is to be an 
Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile — it is to know the 
beatitude of the pure in heart, who see God's face, and 
His name is in their foreheads — it is to have that " state 
of mind for which all alike sigh, and the want of which 
makes life a failure for most : it is to enjoy that heaven, 
which is everywhere if we could but enter it, and yet 
almost nowhere, because so few of us can." It is not, alas ! 
from want of knowledge that we do not enter this 
heaven. I do not doubt that the youngest of you 
knows well what is meant by being harmless in the 
sight of God; and that, if you were asked to write 
down your notion of what a boy should be if he were 
striving to walk as a true disciple of Christ, you could 
do it perfectly well. I once tried the experiment. I 
set to a form of boys, not older than most of you, the 
task of sketching for me their notion of a right noble 
and perfect youthful character. The answers were 
remarkable. In details they all differed ; in substance 
they were all the same. Tew boys omitted any essen- 
tial point in the fair unity of virtues ; all gave outlines 
of character which, were they realised, would cause 
this earth to blossom once more like the garden of the 
Lord. What could one say on reading these ideals? 
What but " They have well spoken all that they have 
spoken : oh ! that there were such a heart in them ! " 
What but " If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye 
do them." For indeed, and alas ! I do not suppose 
that even the youngest boy ever becomes a bad boy for 
want of knowing better. The Ten Commandments 
are plain enough ; the directions of duty unmistakably 



320 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

authoritative; the voice of conscience is indisputably- 
clear. But men sin because they do not see the fatal 
degradation of the ruined future in the seductive 
whisper of the tempting present ; they sin because, in 
the first instance, the intense voice of passion drowns 
the low whisper of conscience; they continue in sin 
because the dull, heavy chains of habit fetter the 
enfeebled resistance of reason. They choose death 
rather than life, because they have not faith ; they love 
the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds 
are evil. 

V. But the question is, Is this quite an universal 
experience ? Have none but Jesus ever been in this 
life blameless and harmless— the sons of God without 
rebuke? Yes, some have been; and what some have 
been, all may be — gentle, faithful, beautiful to God — 
"transparent as crystal; active as fire ; pure and tender 
as grace ; strong, generous, enduring, as the hearts of 
martyrs." It has been so, for instance, in the conquest 
of the commonest vices, and the attainment of the 
rarest of virtues. The love of money is the root of all 
evil; yet avarice has been absolutely non-existent in 
some lofty souls. As one case in thousands, take that 
of our own Edmund of Canterbury, whom nothing could 
persuade to keep under lock and key the little which 
he did not spend in charity, and who, leaving it loose 
in his window-sill, would often strew it over with 
ashes, saying, " Ashes to ashes ; dust to dust." Sensu- 
ality, again, is the most frightful curse and scourge of 
a guilty world, yet perfect chastity has been reached 
even by the young. Just as the mere presence of the 
youthful Cato overawed the profligate Eomans in their 
Saturnalia, so in the young Bernardino of Siena, though 
beautiful and graceful in person, there was even in his 



xxxii.] BLAMELESS AND HARMLESS. 321 

boyhood such angel modesty, such noble dignity, that, 
if he merely entered a room, all that was foolish and 
foul in the conversation of his companions was hushed 
at once into shamed silence. Or, to take one more 
common sin, it is scarcely one in a million who does 
not sometimes yield to irritability. Yet we are told of 
one who died not many years ago — the famous Cur6 
d'Ars — that, though at every moment you might see 
him surrounded, pressed, harassed by indiscreet multi- 
tudes, wearied by idle questions, besieged by impossible 
demands, assailed by cruel calumnies, rewarded by base 
ingratitude, yet he was never seen unequal to himself, 
always gracious, lovable, sympathising, smiling; no 
word of passion passed his lips, no cloud of vexation 
overshadowed his countenance. Now if these and 
other virtues — faith, meekness, temperance, brotherly 
kindness, charity — have shone so perfectly in the lives 
of the saints of God, knowing, as we do, that there is a 
solidarity in the virtues as in the vices, and that one 
virtue usually lies close beside another, like the pearls 
that touch each other in the same necklace — while one 
vice is usually found in closest proximity to another, 
like burning links of the same iron chain — we might 
naturally expect that where one virtue thus existed in 
its perfectness, the others also would be found. And 
so it has ever been. Yes ; we read of many of these 
high saints, blameless and harmless, the sons of God 
without rebuke. Such in the old world were Socrates, 
the wise teacher, and Marcus Aurelius, the stainless 
Emperor. Such was the great founder, St. Benedict of 
Nursia; such was the great scholar, St. Thomas of 
Aquino; such was the brave crusader, St. Louis of 
France ; such the saintly painter, Angelico of Fiesole ; 
such was Melanchthon, the gentle reformer ; such was 

M.S. Y 



322 IN TEE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

Whitefield, the fervent preacher ; such was Howard, the 
prison philanthropist ; such was Henry Martyn, the 
self-denying missionary ; such were hundreds more, 
whose names and memories are to all good men as 
beacon-lights upon tb.e holy hills ; and thousands more, 
whose names, unknown on earth, are written in heaven, 
and who have left the world sweeter and brighter than 
before. Nor have we only read of them : we have 
known them, we have loved them, we have seen their 
faces, and not in dreams ; we have watched, and grown 
better as we watched, the width of their sympathy, the 
manliness of their modest worth. We have seen them 
even among the young, and when we turned, wearied 
and saddened, from the churlishness and the childish- 
ness of natures swollen with the rank wind of pride, or 
repellent with the morbid corruption of selfishness, 
our souls have been refreshed by their unselfish sorrow, 
their unaffected delicacy, their spontaneous charity, 
their ingenuous relf-reproach. Cedars were these in 
God's fair garden — constellations in the firmament of 
Christian nobleness. Clean hands had they, and pure 
hearts ; and they spake the truth, and did the thing 
that was right, and never slandered, and did not 
think much of themselves, but were lowly in their 
own eyes ; and therefore they did not fall. These are 
they who came in their white robes out of much tribu- 
lation; and the Shepherd of their souls feedeth them 
in green pastures, and hath led them forth for ever 
beside the still waters of comfort. And when we 
contemplate such lives — when from this low smoke 
and stir, and contact with so much that is mean and 
vile — we raise our eyes to the sunlit heights whereon 
they sit in their solemn choirs and sweet societies, is 
there any but the very deadest heart, which feels no 



xxxii.] BLAMELESS AND HARMLESS. 323 

more beauty in the picture, " Blameless and harmless, 
the sons of God without rebuke " ? — no more force in 
the encouragement, " Oh 1 serve the Lord in the beauty 
of holiness"? 

But perhaps one and another may say, But how can 
vje be this ? We are not this. We are so far from 
blameless, that our faults are gross and glaring to our- 
selves, and still more so to others. We have been 
neither humble, nor loving, nor grateful, nor obedient, 
nor pure ; our words are often shameful ; our acts often 
dishonourable ; our thoughts — oh ! what a desperate 
wickedness is often there ! Why then do you preach 
this lovely ideal of innocence to us who are not inno- 
cent — to us, the harvest of whose life has not been 
golden grain, but coarse, and sour, and rank — like the 
grass that groweth on the house-tops, wherewith the 
mower filleth not his hand, nor he that gathereth the 
sheaves his bosom ? Ah ! wait, my brethren, before 
you say all this. This ideal is open to you. For if 
innocence can never again be yours, repentance can. 
If not yours can be the blessedness of them to whom 
the Lord imputeth no sin, and in whose spirit there is 
no guile, yet yours can be the blessedness of him whose 
unrighteousness is forgiven, whose sin is covered. " The 
prayers of Penitence," says the grand old allegory of 
Homer, " are the daughters of God." They are lame, for 
they cannot keep up with the rushing feet and desperate 
bound of Guilt and Eetribution ; they are wrinkled, for 
they live amid silence, and sorrow, and chastisement ; 
they have downcast eyes, for it is among the guilty 
that their work is thrown. But when Guilt has been 
accomplished and Eetribution come — when Mercy has 
played her part and Vengeance has leapt upon the 
stage — then, with uplifted hands and streaming eyes, 

Y 2 



324 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. xxxn. 

and with voices of anguish, that pierce the heavens, they 
calm the awakened wrath, and do much to heal the 
havoc and the ruin of man's iniquity. Oh ! if indeed 
you hate sin, and desire to be delivered from its slavery 
and from its stain — if indeed you are not an insolent 
rebel and a hardened offender — the means of grace 
are open ; there is yet a white robe for you in the holy 
land — your foot may still traverse the streets of gold — 
your lips drink of the clear river which flows out of the 
throne of God and of the Lamb. For the love of God 
still pleads with you ; His Holy Spirit still strives to 
wean you from your living death. Be humble, be 
sincere, be in earnest ; and then, if you resolve, if you 
watch, if you pray, if you strive, if you believe — you 
may be divinely restored, progressively sanctified ; and 
though now your sins are hateful to God, and odious to 
man, and degrading to yourselves — though you feel, 
however you brazen and brave it out, yet, at every 
better and truer moment, that sin is misery and that 
sin is weakness — yet even you — for His sake who died 
that you may live — by His power, whose word released 
the demoniac, and whose touch purified the leper — even 
you, like God's fairest and holiest saints, may by 
repentance become now, and may be more and more 
hereafter, "blameless and harmless, the sons of God 
without rebuke." 

Sept. 26, 1875. 



SERMON XXXIII. 
HANDWRITINGS ON TEE WALL. 

Dan. v. 25. 

" And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, 

Upharsin. " 

The Book of Daniel, which now enters into the cycle 
of Sunday First Lessons, presents a series of pictures 
so solemn, so stately, so striking, that I think even the 
dullest imagination must be somewhat stirred by them. 
In chapter after chapter, like Titanic frescoes in some 
Eastern temple, you have scenes, set side by side with 
marvellous contrast, of youthful temperance and regal 
luxury; of tyrannous insolence and intrepid faithful- 
ness; of colossal sacrilege and sweeping retribution. 
In the first chapter, four young Jewish boys, glowing 
with mode-sty and hardihood, refusing the wine and the 
dainties of the palace, grow up fairer and sweeter on 
pulse and water than the pampered minions among 
whom they live. In the second, one of these Jewish 
boys interprets the dark dream-secrets which baffle the 
Chaldsean sages. In the next, the other three of those 
four boys stand steadfast, even to the fire, against the 
worship of the golden image in Dura's plain ; and in 
the fourth, the great Nebuchadnezzar, at the moment 
of intoxicating exultation, is smitten suddenly with 



320 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

shameful madness ; but is restored to grandeur when 
the lesson of humility is learnt. In the fifth, which we 
shall read as the Evening Lesson, the deadly warning 
flashes on the walls of the banquet-house ; and after 
it, — as lightning follows thunder, — the stroke of ruin 
falls. Are not these plain lessons which he who runs 
may read? Lessons that health is granted to self- 
denial, and that beauty is the sacrament of goodness : — 
that God sends a glistering angel, if need be, to keep 
virtue safe ; — that there is laughter in heaven at human 
pride ; that there is joy in heaven at human penitence : 
that there is vengeance in heaven for human crimes. 
And how full are these chapters of memorable utter- 
ance valuable to all boys who aspire to live a noble 
life ? May they not be specially valuable to you, the 
sons of. an heroic island, and of a school which must 
be above all a school which was meant to be the stern 
yet tender nurse of manly simplicity and self-denying 
work ? u Our God whom we serve is able to deliver 
us out of the burning fiery furnance ; but if not, be it 
known unto thee, king, that we will not serve thy 
gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set 
up " — there rings the glorious trumpet-note of undaunted 
obstinacy and defiant faithfulness. "Hew the tree 
down, and destroy it ; yet leave the stump in the tender 
grass of the field ; " — there is the stern Nemesis of self- 
satisfaction, and the last chance for utter penitence ; — 
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin — "Numbered, numbered, 
weighed, and they shall divide ; " — there is the doom 
that follows neglected warning. 

II. You know the story. " Belshazzar the king made 
a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine 
before the thousand/' So, as with a crashing overture 
of orchestral music, the tale begins. Imagine the 



xxxiit.] HANDWRITINGS ON THE WALL. 327 

following splendour for yourselves ; — that vast Baby- 
lonian palace, with its kiosks and fountains, its hanging 
gardens, and long arcades; every wall glowing with 
its weird images of Pagan symbolism; every portal 
guarded by colossal forms of winged cherubim, half- 
animal, half-human, staring through the dusk, with 
calm eyes, on the little lives of men ; and everywhere, 
sweeping through court after court and chamber after 
chamber, the long and gorgeous processions of Chaldsean 
conquerors, portrayed with vermilion, exceeding in 
dyed attire ; and gathered there the princes, the wives, 
the concubines, — all that the satraps could display of 
magnificence, and all that the harems hid of loveliness, 
as though in scorn of the enemy without, vainly 
thundering at those brazen gates. And, at last, as 
though sacrilege were needed to fire the mad festivity, 
they pledged their gods of brass and stone in those great 
cups of consecrated gold which Solomon had made for 
the Temple of the Eternal. And then the awful dis- 
turbance of the feast : that ghastly apparition ; that 
something which looked like the spectral semblance of 
the fingers of some gigantic hand, moving slowly along 
the wall where the central lamp flung its most vivid 
light ; and those seeming letters, which, as it moved, 
passed from under its dark shadow into a baleful glare ; 
and while it moved, and when it went, the king, with 
fixed eyes, and ashy looks, and knees that smote 
together, staring in the very paralysis of fear, not, as 
before, on the crimson annals of Chaldsean conquest, 
but on some awful decree of an offended God recorded 
in hieroglyphs of undecipherable fire. The wild cry 
which summoned his magicians ; the entrance of the 
queen-mother, to tell her son of the Jewish boy — an 
old man now — whom his father had taken captive, and 



328 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

in whom was the spirit of the holy gods ; and how 
Daniel came, and read those fearful letters into the 
four words : — 

" Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin — 
Numbered, numbered, weighed, aud they shaU divide ;"" — 1 

all this you know. Short was the space for repentance. 
In that night was Belshazzar, king of the Chaldseans, 
slain. " That night," as an English poet has written 

it— 

" That night they slew him on his father's throne, 
The deed unnoticed, and the hand unknown : 
Crownless and sceptreless Belshazzar lay, 
A robe of purple round a form of clay. " 

III. You must not think that this was the only 
warning which Belshazzar had received. If it came 
too late, that was because it was the warning of retri- 
bution, not the warning of mercy ; it was only because 
all previous warnings had been neglected and despised. 
His father's dreams of the shattered colossus and the 
felled tree ; the brute madness which had afflicted him ; 
the besieging of his own city ; the fact that the shouts 
of an enemy might have mingled with the very songs 
of his banquet ; — these were all warnings to this crowned 
fool, but they had all been fruitless. Do not similar 
warnings come to every sinner, long before the warning 
of his doom ? If any of you are living a life of sin, 
have they not come to you ? Have there been for you 
no dreams in the ' darkness ? no voices in the silence ? 
no hauntings of fear ? no burdens of remorse ? no 
memories of innocence ? no aches of shame ? no qualms 
of sickness ? no echoing, as of ghostly footfalls, in the 
far-off corridors of life ? And later on, if these have 
all been neglected, are you conscious now of no deriding, 
deadly enemy doing siege to the golden Babylon of life ? 

1 Dividentes (sc. erunt). 



xxxiii.] HANDWRITINGS ON THE WALL. 329 

—no attempts of your own to drown in dead sloth, or 
hardened perversity, the hoarse murmurs of that 
approaching foe ? And if in spite of all these the soul 
still sin and sin, — hardened to the pain of sin, — ceasing 
to feel its shame, lulled in its dead security — then has 
no history, has no biography, told you what you, 
young as you are, can hardly yet have yourselves 
experienced, that there comes at last sometimes — and 
sometimes, alas ! too late — a handwriting upon the wall, 
which is only the handwriting of doom ? 

IV. But though my text is taken from this hand 
writing upon the wall, which was the doom of Belshazzar, 
it is with the earlier, less terrible warnings, that I 
have to do ; — the warnings full of gentleness and mercy, 
which tell us of destruction while it still is distant, 
which bid us seek refuge while there is time to fly. 
Those warnings are always written on the palace wall 
of life ; raise your eyes, and you will see them running, 
like a legible inscription, round the cornice of your 
banquet-house of youth. But is it not literally an 
every day experience that an inscription always before 
the eyes is little heeded ? I imagine that the ancient 
Athenians paid little heed to the moral sentences which 
were carved upon the Hermae in every street. I 
imagine that the Turks of Constantinople have taken 
but little notice of that 6 XpLcrrbs viica which remains, 
legible and unobliterated, like a prophecy which shall 
still be fulfilled, upon their central mosque. To come 
nearer home,- — there are four noble, inspiring lines 
carved over the fireplace of a large room in this college ; 
but do they enter specially into the life of those who 
daily see them ? and, in another room, there is engraved 
upon a clock a very solemn Greek word; 1 but of all 

1 i£ayopd(ov. 



330 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

who know what that word means, do all try their very 
utmost to construe it in the noble version of an earnest, 
vigorous, self-denying life ? And just in the same way 
do we not, all of us alike, often thus neglect and forget 
the notices of God ? Yes ; and that is why in dealing 
with us He is obliged, now and then, to make us see 
them — to force their meaning into us, — to interpret 
them again, when the dimmed wall has been painted 
over with other symbols, and familiarity has made them 
meaningless to eyes that will not see. And these 
reminders from God of truths which we have forgotten 
come sometimes very terribly; not whispered, but 
shouted, — not shouted only, but cut deep — not only cut 
deep before the eyes, but branded in letters of fire upon 
the soul. When palsying sickness is the debt due from 
weakened manhood to sinful youth ; — when the loss of 
the last chance brings home to us the sense of the 
squandered opportunity ; when the cold light of heaven, 
bursting through the drawn curtains of the hypocrite, 
shows him to himself and to others, not as he wished 
to be thought, but as he is ; above all, when sin 
has been punished by God's suffering us to fall into 
deeper and deadlier sin, and crime flings its glare of 
illumination on the self-deception which said of sin, 
" There is no harm in it "• — then it is that God puts 
forth the fingers of a man's hand, and His inscription, 
once unheeded, flashes into letters of fire. And — since 
be sure your sins will find you out — so must it be, 
sooner or later, to every sinner to whom repentance 
calls in vain. So that what I have been trying to urge 
on you to-day is to read those milder warnings, to 
listen to those stiller, smaller voices, which come to us, 
not at some terrible crisis, but at quiet moments, and 
ere we sleep at night, and on our knees, and when we 



xxxiii. J HANDWRITINGS ON THE WALL. 331 

read our Bibles, and in this chapel, and before Holy 
Communions, and in every blessed means of grace. 
For indeed those words, written once in the palace 
of Belshazzar, are for us written for ever in the house 
of life; and each one of you, in your own hearts, 
may still read the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Peres, as 
they were left by the awful moving of the spectral 
hand. 

V. I will only try for the brief remainder of our 
time to brighten for you into legibility one of the 
many meanings of that first twice-repeated word. 
Mene, Mene — numbered, numbered. The last number- 
ing—when all that we have, and all that we are, is 
numbered and finished — that will come to us all. But 
what ought we to number now ? I would say especially^ 
number your opportunities. Each moment is an oppor- 
tunity, and if, as the old sundial says, Ex hoc momento 
pendit cetemitas, what an opportunity, what a mass of 
opportunities must each day be ! And each prayer is 
an opportunity. Have you never longed to open your 
whole heart to some friend who could help you in the 
difficulties and trials of your boyhood and inexperience 
—father, or mother, or elder brother, or teacher, — who 
might, once for all, influence, perhaps for good, your 
whole life, give you advice, give you help, give you com- 
fort, save you it may be from years of folly and wretch- 
edness ? Ay, but after all, the very best of men cannot 
help you, and save you, and enlighten you as your God 
and Father can, as your Friend and Saviour can ; — and 
what an opportunity then every prayer you utter as you 
clasp His feet ! And each Sunday is an opportunity, — 
an opportunity by religious thoughts, religious services, 
religious studies, to raise your souls above the routine 
and frivolity of daily life, and to warn you not only 



332 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

against all sin, and impurity, and temptation, but also 
against all lazy, and unguarded, and dangerous hours. 
And these years of your school-life are an opportunity 
— number them. Consider how great is the weight 
they have to bear, and how much depends on your 
forming here a manly and sober view of duty, and 
making here a manly and stern choice between what is 
good and what is vile. And, numbering thus, " Seek to 
make your weeks roll round like the wheels of a chariot 
which is to carry you along the road of God's commands 
and purposes, and to bring you constantly nearer to the 
gates of Heaven." Do this, and then be sure that 
the Spirit of God will descend upon you week by week 
and day by day ; and the satisfaction of your Saviour, 
week by week, and day by day, will wash away your 
sins ; and each day will tell another, and each night 
certify another of your daily approach to God. 

VI. But the word Mene is repeated, and I want 
you to see, lastly, that if you do not thus soberly 
and thankfully number your opportunities, and your 
days, and your prayers, and your sabbaths, a sadder, 
more disastrous numbering awaits you. How if, some 
day, in awful bitterness, you have to number, not your 
blessings, but your sins ? How if, like David, you have 
to say, " My sins have taken such hold upon me that I 
am not able to look up ; they are more in number than 
the hairs of my head, therefore my heart faileth me " ? 
Ah, in that day the gentle Mene of warning will burst 
into the flaming Mene of terror. For there is nothing 
more dreadful than a numbering of sins. The dead leaf 
falls, the chill wind sweeps it away: how slight a 
thing it seems : but go into the forest, and there see 
those dead leaves rolling in ghastly heaps, putrescent, 
numberless, into the dank and herbless soil; they are 



xxxiii.] HANDWRITINGS ON THE WALL. 333 

not a slight thing then ! Even so it is with the dead 
leaves which strew the floor of life — dead leaves of 
sins from which the life is gone — of sins which you 
have* done with, but which have not done with you. 
Let me help you to judge of the sadness of such num- 
berings. Two hundred years ago there lived a great 
poet, of humble rank, but of noblest character, who from 
boyhood had taken intense toil as his lot in life, who 
turned with fastidious haughtiness from every form of 
corruption, and cherished from his earliest years the 
dignity of a holy self-respect. Yet great as he was, 
and good as he was, and much as he had done, this 
great poet, John Milton, wrote on his twenty-third 
birthday : — 

" My hasting days fly on in full career, 
And my late spring no bud or blossom showeth. 

***** 

And inward ripeness doth much less appear 

Than some more timely-happy spirits endueth. 

Yet be it more or less, or soon or slow, 

It shall be still, in strictest measure even, 

In that same lot, however near or high, 

Towards which time leads me, and the will of Heaven. } ' 

In this vow and retrospect, if there be any sadness, it is 
only the sadness of the faithful, who when he has done 
all that is commanded him, yet, from the very loftiness 
of an ideal which towers so high above his attainments, 
says still, " I am an unprofitable servant." And now 
contrast these with the sad, remorseful verses written in 
his Bible by another poet, Hartley Coleridge, on his 
twenty-fifth birthday : — 

" When I received this volume small 
My years were barely seventeen, 
When it was hoped I should be all 
Which once, alas ! I might have been. 



334 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

1 i And now my years are twenty-five, ' 
And every mother hopes her lamb, 
And every happy child alive, 
May never be what now I am." 

And then after lines of deep pathos and remorseful 
memory, he humbly adds : — 

" Of what men are, and why they are 
So weak, so woefully beguiled, 
Much have I learnt ; but better far, 
I know my soul is reconciled. " 

Once more, contrast this sorrow of bitter repentance 
with the hopeless, the cynical despair of these lines by 
a third poet — Lord Byron — on his thirty-third birth- 
day:— 

" Through life's dull road, so dim and dirty, 
1 have dragg'd to three -and-thirty. 
What have these years left to me ? 
Nothing, except thirty-three." 

Who was it that wrote thus ? He was a man of noble 
rank, of vigorous health, of great beauty, of splendid 
genius ; how had he used these great gifts ? Not for 
man's good — not for God's glory — not, oh not, as you 
will see, for his own happiness. Those gifts were 
squandered, that beauty defaced, that strength abused, 
that genius laid like incense on unhallowed altars. It 
began when he was a Harrow boy. He had been a bad 
boy, and he grew up into a godless man. And when 
the days of numbering came how unspeakably sad, how 
utterly heartrending they were. "What a difference 
between the white ashes and the gray heart of Byron at 
thirty-three, or the deep remorse and humble penitence 
of Hartley Coleridge of twenty-five, and the calm noble- 
ness and conscious strength of Milton at twenty-three ! 
And in all Byron's later poems, however finely uttered, 
there is the same bitterness, the same despair ; the same 
wail that the bloom of the heart has fled as fast as the 



xxxiil] HANDWBITINGS ON THE WALL. 335 



blush upon the cheek ; that he has been driven over the 
shoals of guilt ; that the magnet is lost, the sail 
shivered; that 

" Oh could I feel as I have felt, or be as I have been, 
Or weep, as I could once have wept, in many a vanished scene ! 
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be, 
So, 'midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me." 

And on his very last birthday, but three months before 
his death, he writes, though still young : — 

" My days are in the yellow leaf, 
The flower, the fruits of love are gone, 
The worm, the canker, and the grief 
Are mine alone." 

You see it is all Mene, Mene — numbered, numbered. 
Ay, and it is Tekel too; weighed in the balances of 
God, weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, weighed 
even in the balances of his own judgment, he is found 
wanting. And oh, do not think that this is only the 
sorrow and the shipwreck of splendid genius ! The 
wretchedest, craziest, most worthless shallop may be 
wrecked as hopelessly as the stateliest ship; and the 
meanest, dullest, stupidest, least-gifted schoolboy — as 
he may save his soul, and make it, through Christ's 
redemption, worthy to live with God, so may also lose 
his soul, with misery as intense and remorse as shame- 
ful — though he cannot utter them — as a poet or a king. 
Mene, Mene, Tekel, is for everyone of us : ay, and far 
away a voice peals forth in the distance, " Upharsin," 
"And they shall divide." Ay! be not deceived; good 
is not evil, and a state of sin is not a state of grace, 
and the angels shall divide the just from the wicked as 
the reapers divide wheat from tares. Oh then, if you 
would save many and many a future year, and the long 



336 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. xxxiii. 

hereafter, from the scathing misery of vain remorse, — if 
you would not have the sole remembrance of your boy- 
hood to be a bitter sigh — read that warning word on the 
walls of the inner temple — number ere God numbers — 
pray to Him, ere it be too late, " So teach us to number 
our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." 

October 17, 1875. . 



SEKMON XXXIV. 

THE COURAGE OF THE SAINTS POSSIBLE IN 
BOYHOOD. 

Psalm xvi. 3. 

" All my delight is upon the saints, that are in the earth : and upon 
such as excel in virtue." 

One morning, among the high Alps, I happened to 
be on a glacier which lay deep beneath a circle of 
stupendous hills, when the first beam of sunrise smote 
the highest summit of Monte Eosa. As I gazed from 
the yet unbroken darkness of the valley, so vivid was 
the lustre of that ray of gold upon the snow, that it 
looked like a flame of intensest crimson; and even while 
I gazed, the whole " pomp and prodigality of heaven * 
began to be unfolded before me. Until they burned 
like watchfires of advancing angels, mountain-crest after 
mountain- crest caught the risen splendour, and it flowed 
down their mighty crags in rivers of ever-broadening 
gold, until not only was the East full of glory and flame, 
but the West too echoed back the dawn in bright 
reflection, and the peaks which had caught the earliest 
blaze were lost in blue sky and boundless light, — and it 
was day. I never think of the Saints of God without 
their recalling to my memory those sunlit hills. We 
may be wandering in the dangerous darkness; but they 
are the proof that the Sun has risen, — they are the 
M.S. z 



338 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

prophecy of the lingering day. And hence, to-morrow 
— which is All Saints' Day — is a day which I can never 
pass unnoticed, — a day which imperiously dictates the 
subject of the Sermon. But though that subject be 
embarrassing from its very vastness, yet, if I do nothing 
else, I shall regard it as a good end gained, by God's 
blessing, if I teach you to think much of All Saints' 
Day, and never to let it pass without trying to realize 
its noble lessons. It will be something to have quick- 
ened your " delight in the saints that are in the earth, 
and in them that excel in virtue." For while the world 
says, "Be as others are; do what others do; think as 
others think; let custom lie upon you heavy as death; 
leave not my beaten path, or you will be prosecuted;" 
Christ, on the other hand, says, " Follow not the multi- 
tude to do evil; aim at that only which is greatest; 
strive for that only which is best; be perfect as your 
Father in Heaven is perfect." And oh, it is good for us 
thus to lift up our eyes unto the hills ! It is good for 
us in the midst of lives so inconsistent, so dwarfed, so 
conventional as ours, to bear in mind how much greater 
and better others have been; — how dauntlessly good, 
how magnificently victorious over vice and sin. Their 
high examples teach us how we may rise above our 
nothingness ; — how little we are when we live the 
selfish life of the world; how great we may be, if we 
live as the Sons of God. 

I. Once get this view of things, — the view that we 
read of the good, and wise, and holy, only that we may 
strive to become like them, — and then all History, all 
Biography, will become to you radiant with bright 
examples. No virtue will lack its illustration; no age 
its glory. Among the many many reasons why it is 
most desirable that you should not only read more, but 



.xxxiv.] COURAGE OF SAINTHOOD. 339 

read better and higher books than those cheap and 
trashy fictions — the mere refuse of tenth-rate literature, 
not worthy of the name of literature at all, which I see 
so often in the hands of some of you — is that you may 
get to see what great and good men have been. If I 
were asked what reading was best adapted to fill the 
soul of an English boy with high imaginations, and to 
keep his heart pure, and to give him lofty aims, and to 
store his mind with lovely and inspiring imagery, I 
should say, first of all, the best poems of our best poets ; 
and next to this, the histories and lives of our loftier 
brethren in the great family of God. 

II. But if we know how to read aright, — then in all 
ages, and from all nations, passes before us the glorious 
procession of the Saints of Christ. Go back to the 
earliest dawn of history, and think of Abraham, the 
elect Chaldee, and his simple unselfish life in the 
nomad tent; of Isaac, and those meditations in the 
fields at eventide, which kept his heart at peace; of 
Jacob, and how he wrestled in mighty prayer ; of Joseph, 
the young, the self-controlled, the pure, and that grave 
protest which he left as his eternal legacy to the 
tempted youth of every age, "How can I do this great 
wickedness and sin against God?" Think then of 
the man Moses, so meek, and so heroic ; of Gideon's 
modest intrepidity; of David's passionate repentance; 
of Hezekiah's utter and childlike faith. Then read the 
grand old Hebrew prophets; — Elijah, the rough ascetic, 
and Daniel, the polished courtier, and Isaiah, the 
eloquent statesman, and Jeremiah, the timid priest, 
and Amos, the bold gatherer of sycamore-leaves, — all 
uttering before apostate peoples and angry kings their 
dauntless protest for truth and God. And when 
the Maccabean patriots have closed the chequered story 

z 2 



340 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

of Jewish fortune, we see John in his mantle of camel's 
hair, and we see the heavens opened and the dove 
descend on the head of Him who was the King of all 
Saints, and the Desire of all nations. Then we sit 
beside Paul the aged, chained to the rude legionary 
in his Eoman prison. And as the drama of history 
advances, we stand in the gardens of Nero and see the 
martyrs die in their shirts of flame; we fly with the 
hermits to the desert solitudes; the sweet serious 
countenances of the Benedictines look down on us 
from their holy cells; we listen in the lecture-rooms 
of the saintly scholars, and see the beautiful face of 
St. Edmund of Canterbury, the pallor of which became 
" of a fair shining red " when he spoke of Christ or of 
holy things. We watch the heroic struggles of the first 
witnesses against a corrupted Church, and give our 
admiring pity to the dying agonies of a Fra Dolcino, a 
Savonarola, and a Huss. Anon, the thunder-tones of 
Luther wake an echo in our souls. Our hearts glow as, 
with a Vincent de Paul, we found the Sisterhoods of 
Mercy, and with a Howard gauge the depths of guilt 
and misery in the prisons of Europe, And to this long 
line of the world's noblest, I add the wisest and the 
purest of the heathen. As we dwell on the communion 
of saints, I recall Socrates, 

' ' That white soul, clothed in a satyr's form, 
That shone beneath the laurels day by day, 
And, fired with burning faith in God and right, 
Doubted men's doubts away. " 1 

I think of Epictetus, poor and a slave, and lame, and 
the darling of the immortals. 2 I think of that bright 

1 Songs of Two Worlds. 2nd series. 
3 "AovAos 'ETviKTrjTos yep6fir]i/ /caret (Tqj/jl dudirrjpos 
Kal TT€j/lr)i> 7 Ipos na\ (j)t\os ddai'drois." 

See Brucker, Hist. Crit. PHlos. II. ii. 563. 



xxxiv.] COURAGE OF SAINTHOOD. 341 

consummate flower of Pagan chivalry, the sad, great 
warrior, philosopher and moralist, the Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius Antoninus. High heroes of unselfishness, 
pure ideals of excellence, the world's true soldiers, the 
world's true nobles, the world's best gentlemen ! To 
think of them, to live with them, is to be stimulated, 
and encouraged, and refreshed. In life we meet the 
churl and the scoundrel, and we see that in human 
souls the ape and the tiger are not yet dead ; but — are 
we angered, are we weary, are we discouraged ? — then 
the high faith of these saints, their golden hope, their 
courage, their sweetness, their temperance, their magna- 
nimity, restore to us our shaken faith in human nature ; 
they show us what men may be by showing what they 
have been ; they make us say to our souls, " The waves 
may seethe with mud, but be thou as the promontory 
on which they break." " Whatever any one does or says, 
thou must be good; just as if the gold, or the emerald, 
or the purple were always saying thus, ' Whatever any 
one does or says, I must be emerald and keep my 
colour.'" 1 

III. All Samts' Day bears to us, then, this witness, 
that we too are called to be saints ; that this is the w T ill 
of God, even our sanctification. Now perhaps some 
might think that there is a certain irony, a certain 
unreality, in telling the ordinary dull, commonplace 
schoolboy, whose moral sense seems often dormant, 
whose words are often bad, whose standard is often 
low, whose life is generally of the average, that God 
bids him strive after saintliness. He is living too 
often a life in which good and evil are not wrestling 
shoulder to shoulder in all the passionate energy of 
deadly struggle, but in which they are " lying down flat 

1 M. Aurel. Anton, vii. 15. 



342 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

on the ground " in fatal truce ; the common vulgar life, 
in which the boy is neither good nor bad, but just hap- 
hazard : neither cold nor hot, but just lukewarm ; the 
life of the sandy desert, in which every pebble is a 
rock; the life of the flat plain, in which "every molehill 
is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree." It 
sounds like irony to tell this average every-day lad^ — 
not very ideal in his habits, not very intelligent in his 
pursuits, not very noble in his instincts, not very 
delicate in his sensibilities, — that he is to be a saint. 
Ah ! believe me there should be no irony in it; none, if 
you believe in the "communion of saints" : none, if you 
be the soldier and servant of Him who is the King of 
Saints ; none, if you wish, in the furthest future, to share 
in such honour and beatitude as have all His saints. 
And All Saints' Day is meant to teach you this ; it is 
meant to make you believe in the divine within you, 
and read on your souls the heraldic blazonry of their 
high origin from God. 

IV. But since it would be vague if I were merely to 
bid you follow God's saints and try and excel in all 
virtues, I will, for the remainder of our time, single out 
but one saintly virtue, such that if you have it, all the 
rest will follow it. 

That virtue is moral courage. 

You all love courage ; you all despise cowardice. Of 
course you do ; every Englishman does. At Waterloo, 
one of our allied Belgian regiments took fright, turned 
cowards, and ran away: our British fellows were so 
indignant at this poltroonery that they turned half 
round and fired a parting volley into the rear of these 
flying friends. But this kind of courage — the courage 
which faces physical danger — though the world sur- 
rounds it with such halo of glory, is just a matter of 



xxxiv.] COURAGE OF SAINTHOOD. 343 

course. The saints of God have ever had it, and never 
thought much of it. The " flush and flashy spirits/' 
who would try to taunt saints with cowardice, do so 
only in ignorant falsehood. " We could tell them," says 
one ■' of those who fought with savage beasts, yea, of 
maidens who stept to fttce them as coolly as a modern 
bully into the ring. We could tell them of those who 
drank molten lead as cheerfully as they do the juice of 
the grape, and played with the red fire and the bickering 
flames as gaily as they with the golden curls. And what 
do they talk of war? Have they forgot Crom well's 
iron band, who made their chivalry to skip ? or the Scots 
Cameronians, who seven times, with their Christian 
chief, received the thanks of Marlborough, that first of 
English captains ? or Gustavus Adolphus, whose camp 
sang psalms in every tent ? or Nelson's Methodists, who 
were the most trusted of that hero's crew ? " 1 But I 
say that this courage — this gallantry and battle brunt 
in the temper of men — this tenacity of the tiger, 
" who leaps with bare breast and unarmed claws upon 
surrounding deaths " — is a matter of course. Some of 
the very best of men have shared it with some of the 
worst ; and a Catiline and a Borgia, no less than a 
Bayard or a Sidney, have died with their hands upon 
the sword-hilt and their feet towards the foe. But how 
far loftier — how truly saintly — is the moral courage of 
the brave and good ; the courage which braves opinion 
in the cause of right; the courage which confronts 
tyranny to protect the weak; the courage which faces 
destruction to put down a wicked custom ; the courage 
which escapes the average — which breaks loose from the 
conventional ! Duke George was a powerful prince and 
Luther a poor monk : it was moral courage when Luther 
1 Edward Irving. I have altered one or two expressions. 



344 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

said, "If I had duty to do in Leipzig, I would ride 
into Leipzig though it rained Duke Georges nine days 
running." x Take one of the most conspicuous instances 
which history affords. The veteran Stilicho had con- 
quered Alaric and his Goths. The Eomans invite the 
hero and his ward — a stupid, cowardly boy, the Emperor 
Honorius — to gladiatorial games in honour of the vic- 
tory. The Empire has been Christian for a hundred 
years, yet these infamous and brutalizing shows still 
continue. They are defended with all sorts of devil's 
sophistry. Deadened by custom, people argue "that 
the gladiators themselves like them; that they gain 
their livelihood by them ; that they train the multitude 
to bravery; that, at any rate, the enjoyment of the 
respectable many is worth more than the anguish of a 
squalid few." The games begin; the tall, strong men 
enter the arena; the tragic cry echoes through the 
amphitheatre, "Ave, Gcesar, morituri te salutamus ;" the 
swords are drawn, and at an instant's signal will be 
bathed in blood. At that very instant down leaps into 
the arena a rude, ignorant monk, 2 who, however rude 
and ignorant, can tear to pieces by the strength of 
righteousness all these devil's cobwebs of guilty custom 
and guilty acquiescence. "The gladiators shall not 
fight," he exclaims : " are you going to thank God by 
shedding innocent blood ? " A yell of execration rises 
from those 80,000 spectators. " Who is this impudent 
wretch who dares to set himself up as knowing better 
than we do ; who dares to accuse eighty thousand people 
—Christians too — of doing wrong ? Down with him ! 
Pelt him ! Cut him down ! " Stones are hurled at him ; 

1 " What a reservoir of dukes to ride into I" — Carlyle, Hero Wor- 
ship. 

2 His name was Telemachus or Almachus. Theodoret, His . v. 62. 
Alban Butler,- Lives of the Saints. Jan. 1. 



xxxiv.] COURAGE OF SAINTHOOD. 345 

the gladiators, angry at his interference, run him through 
with their swords ; he falls dead, and his body is kicked 
aside, and the games go on, and the people — Christians 
and all — shout applause. Ay ! they go on, and the 
people shout, but for the last time. Their eyes are 
opened ; their sophistry is at an end ; the blood of a 
martyr is on their souls. Shame stops for ever the 
massacre of gladiators ; the hearts of Christians were 
no longer " brazed by damned custom," and because one 
poor ignorant hermit has moral courage, "one more 
habitual crime was wiped away from the annals of 
the world." 

V. This was a poor monk's doing, and think not that 
the race of such heroes is dead. I could give you 
dozens of such instances of moral courage, infinitely 
beneficent, if time permitted. I will give you one of 
quite modern days, of which some of the actors are 
living now — the moral courage of the missionary, giving 
up all, suffering, dying, to put down another bad custom 
— the custom of kidnapping — by Christians too — in 
the Southern Seas. Transfer your thoughts from the 
Coliseum of Eome to the coral islands of the Pacific. 
There stand a large multitude of swarthy savages, stark- 
naked, and brutally ignorant, armed with bows and 
clubs and poisoned arrows; and among them stand, 
unarmed, two English bishops : one of them with his 
quick ear, and ready gift of language, is learning, with 
incredible rapidity, how to preach to these poor degraded 
savages the good tidings of the gospel of peace; the 
quick eagle eye of the other is noting every change of 
countenance which, — should it become dubious and 
threatening, — must instantly warn them to reach their 
boat. And sometimes it does threaten, and then these 
two English gentlemen and bishops, of gentle birth, 



346 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of gentle education, have to plunge into the white 
breakers that foam over the reef, and amid waters 
haunted by sharks, and devilfish, and stinging jellies, 
to swim to their boat, while about them whizzes and 
splashes into the water a flight of arrows, each one of 
which, if it only graze, means horrible death — death by 
lockjaw arising from the wound. — And one of those 
bishops is living ; and there four years ago, the other, in 
the midst of that high service, died by the clubs of 
savages, whom he daily risked his life to save; and they 
laid him in an open boat to float away over the bright 
blue water, with his hands crossed, and a palm upon 
his breast. 

VI. Is not looking at such a life something like looking 
at a hill-top fired by the first beams of the rising sun ? 
Such palms and such crowns are hardly for us who 
would "go to heaven in an easy chair/' By the side of 
such lives and such self-denials, do not our lives look 
very vulgar and very selfish ? Yes, but remember two 
things : one, that such ]ives are at the best but a pale 
reflex and faint echo of His life, the life of the Son of 
God, by whose precepts they were guided, by whose 
Spirit they were inspired; the other that that life of 
Christ on earth was meant as the example, not only to 
God's saints, but to all men, and to all schoolboys too. 
Oh, do not slide into the fatal treason and delusion of 
supposing that you can give your boyhood to sin, and 
ignorance, and idleness, and offer only the dregs of your 
life to God. As the boy is, so mostly the man is ; and 
when I see some wretched dullard, leaving behind him 
wherever he goes a trail of vice and meanness as a boy, 
it will not surprise me much to see the same trail 
behind the footsteps of the man. But let me look at 
the opposite picture. There was at Eton, not many 



xxxiv.] COURAGE OF SAINTHOOD. 347 

years ago, a boy hale and strong and fresh coloured, and 
athletic — a boy frank as the day, and diligent, and docile 
— rnot particularly clever, but always high in his form ; 
captain of the boats ; in the cricket eleven; very popular, 
yet very good. Now it was a bad tradition, a bad 
custom there, that, at certain gatherings, songs were 
sometimes sung which were coarse songs, and which were 
not fit for a gentleman, much less for a Christian (and 
every right-minded boy should be both) to sing ; and this 
boy of whom I speak — ready to risk popularity, ready 
to face sneers, ready to seem presumptuous even among 
his elders — declared that, in his presence, at that gather- 
ing, such songs should not be sung ; and when such a 
song was sung he got up then and there, and left the 
room, and thereby stopped the bad custom. That boy 
of whom I now tell you grew up to be that man of 
whom I have just told you. That boy was Coley 
Patteson in 1845 ; that man was Dr. Coleridge Patte- 
son, the martyr Bishop of Melanesia, in 1871. Even 
a boy, then, you see can do at school the duty of a 
saint; because even a boy can do what is right, and 
shame the devil ; because even a boy can boldly rebuke 
vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake. Will you 
— will any one of you — do the same ? Will you have 
courage to do what you know to be right, and to put 
down at all cost what you know to be wrong. Will you 
try to rise above bad customs ? Will you make it a 
duty to " escape the average " ? Most boys do not. The 
average boy, the ordinary boy, if a school have a vicious 
tone, catches that vicious tone, and leaves it worse him- 
self, and worse for others. If a house is unchristian, 
he adopts the tone of his house. If a form is dishonest, 
he will become like the rest of his form. If one or two 
bad boys can set a bad tone, do you think that one or two 



348 IN THE DAYS OF TRY YOUTH, [serm. xxxiv. 

good boys cannot set, and cannot restore, a good tone ? 
Yes ! for sin is cowardice, and sin is weakness, and sin 
is misery; and we were born to be brave, and strong, 
and happy, and the instincts of most boys will be on 
the right side if they have but fair play. Do all you 
can to act up to those instincts yourself, and to foster 
them in others. Do not follow the multitude to do evil. 
Be as the wheat, even if the tares around you are so 
many that hereafter they will have to be gathered in 
bundles for the burning. Let this be your lesson from 
All Saints' Day. Thus, may each and all of you begin 
here, and begin now, your high training as Saints of 
God. 

October 31, 1875. 



SEKMON XXXV. 
THE TRIPLE SANGTIFIGATION. 

1 Thess. v. 23. 

"And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly ; and I pray God 
your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the 
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. " 

Body — soul — spirit : it is the combination of these three 
which makes up our mortal nature; it is the due 
relations between these three which constitute our sole 
possible happiness ; it is the right training of these 
three that is the object of that lifelong education which 
should begin with our earliest years, and end only with 
the grave. 

I. Let us begin with the body. When we consider 
what we are, why we are here, whence we came, and 
whither we are going, what facts strike us at once about 
our mortal bodies ? The first obvious fact is that subtle 
chemistry, that exquisite mechanism, that perfect adapta- 
tion, which brings home to us our creation by some 
divine power — which proves to us that " It is He that 
hath made us, and not we ourselves." The next is, 
that as we did not create, so neither can we preserve 
ourselves. So delicate are the harmonies of our earthly 
frames, so exquisite is the agony which might be 



350 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

caused us by derangements, almost infinitesimal, in their 
structure ; so " strange n is it 

" That a harp of a thousand string 
Should keep in tune so long," 

that we at once see ourselves to be but " as brittle glass 
in His hand ; not only could He crush us with a motion 
of His hand, but were He even to withdraw His hand 
we should fall and break of our own selves." The third 
thing is, that these bodies are subjected to laws that 
cannot be broken; cannot, that is, be broken without 
certain and often terrible suffering; laws which we 
must therefore conclude to be the express will of Him 
who made us. The last fact is, that these bodies are 
lent to us for a time, and for a time only. They 
grow, they strengthen, they decay, they die. It is 
the lesson of the falling leaf. First it glitters in 
the glad, light green; then it passes into summer's 
burnished splendour and autumn's gorgeous colouring ; 
then it hangs sere and ragged in the chilly wind ; last, 
it flutters down, to be trodden into the common soil. 
So is it — so will it be, with all of us. It would be 
strange and painful to count how many have sat in this 
chapel, even in the last few years, who have already 
passed away — some of them in early youth — and who, 
by the inevitable law of death, lie cold under the cold 
sod now. And we do not know how soon the same 
end awaits us ; but we do know, all of us, that, at the 
longest, only 

" A few more years shall roll, 
A few more seasons come," 

before we too shall be numbered among the dead. And 
we do know, for God has revealed to us, that we shall 
arise again, to be judged according to our works ; we 



xxxv.] THE TRIPLE SANCTIFICATION. 351 

shall rise again to receive the things done in the body — 
those same things, not other things — whether they be 
good, or whether they be evil. 

And from all these faets we see clearrly the meaning 
of Scripture when it tells us, that our members are 
members of Christ, and our bodies temples of the Holy 
Ghost. Our bodies are not ourselves, but they are an 
essential part of ourselves, and if we do not train them 
into obedience to God's laws, they react fatally upon 
ourselves, until we become their slaves, and not their 
masters ; and as is said so terribly by Zophar of a 
wicked man, in the book of Job, " His bones are full of 
the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in 
the dust." What, then, are the duties which spring from 
these considerations? How are we to train, how to 
save, how to sanctify our mortal bodies ? Immense 
mistakes have been made on this subject in all ages ; it 
was a mistake when the ancient philosophers regarded 
the body as a prison-house of which to be ashamed ; a 
mistake when the mediaeval monks regarded it as an 
enemy to be crushed ; a mistake, more brutal and fatal 
by far than these, when whole nations gave themselves 
up to bodily indulgences, and said, with the infamous 
inscription on the statue of Sardanapalus, " Eat, drink, 
enjoy thyself, the rest is nothing." Against all these 
errors the testimony of our faith is clear. To each 
Christian it says, Thy body is not a prison-house, but a 
temple of the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth in thee ; thy body 
is not an enemy, but a redeemed and sacred instrument of 
righteousness ; thy body is not to be made the prey and 
victim of its appetites and baser impulses, nor art thou, 
as a mere beast of the field, made to be thus taken and 
destroyed, but thou art a child of God and an heir of 
heaven. He, then, has sanctified the body who has so 



352 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. 

trained himself in youth " that his body is the ready 
servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all 
the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of ; .... 
who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose 
passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, 
the servant of a tender conscience ; who has learnt to 
love all beauty, whether of nature or art ; to hate all 
vileness, and to respect others as himself/' And what 
are the means to this ? Three words, the words of our 
catechism, admirably sum them up. Those three words 
are temperance, soberness, chastity ; those three words 
sum up all our duties to the body, and exclude all sins 
against it ; those three words are the secrets of its beauty, 
its cheerfulness, its health. In this, as in all things else, 
obedience is infinite blessing; self-pleasing is utter 
ruin; perfect duty is perfect happiness. And the 
opposites of these — gluttony, drunkenness, impurity — 
oh, who shall count their victims ? Among the living, 
how does the moan of their anguish arise to God, and 
the air tremble with the sighing of these " Gehazis 
whose leprosy is not upon the forehead." And from 
the pale nations of the dead, how, with the agony upon 
their ravaged faces, start they up in myriads — from 
Sy char, the city of drunkenness, from Kibuoth-Hattaavah, 
the graves of lust ! Oh, if ever your boyhood has but 
one pure aspiration, one solemn moment, one serious 
thought, recognise the high duty of carefully guarding 
your mortal bodies in sanctification and honour; re- 
cognise that none can sin against their mortal bodies 
without, sooner or later, being smitten by the iron 
weapon, and stricken through by the bow of steel ; and 
if ever — whether by careless hours, or false friendships, 
or guilty imaginations, or subtle degeneracies — you be 
tempted to lay waste their sanctities, lift your eyes, and 



xxxv.l THE TRIPLE SANCTIFICATION. 353 



let these awful consequences of sin be to you as the 
fiery swords of cherubim waved to bar your entrance 
from the knowledge of evil, and mark where they crouch 
in the shadow, the terrible executioners of violated laws. 
Wicked sophistries of corrupt companions, wicked 
whisperings of evil passion, may try to deceive you ; 
but be not deceived, for because of these things cometh 
the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. 
Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. 

IT. But the body is not the only thing which we have 
to train; many men are too noble, too fastidious, to 
sacrifice all life to its vilest passions. If man were 
composed only of body or spirit, this would be enough ; 
but it is not enough : between the body and the spirit 
there is what is here called the soul, by which is meant, 
not what we commonly mean by the soul — not the divine 
and immortal part of us — but the mind, and the emotions, 
and the natural life. And, if we are to be presented 
blameless at the coming of Christ, this also must be 
sanctified. For a man may be temperate, sober, chaste, 
and yet no child of God ; or, on the other hand, he may 
be idle, irreverent, covetous, disobedient, ungrateful, 
conceited, childish, dishonourable, false; or supposing 
he be none of these, he may yet be a lover of the world, 
a lover of his own self, selfishly absorbed in the career 
of ambition, in the culture of intellect, in the pursuit of 
wealth. And such are never safe ; they are never to be 
trusted. Morality without religion has never in this 
world's history been an adequate defence. Need you 
any other proof of it than ancient Greece ? She satisfied 
the intellect. She was full of grace, beauty, brightness, 
and knowledge ; yet how utter, how shameful, how 
irremediably despicable was her brief and unpitied fall. 
How distressing is the life even of her philosophers ; 

M.S. A A 



354 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

how did they become vain in their imaginations, and 
their foolish heart was darkened ; how, professing them- 
selves to be wise, did they become fools ; how more and 
more, falling from that starry heaven of their intellect, 
did they sow to the flesh, and of the flesh reap corruption. 
But even if the natural life does not sink thus, yet even 
then it is miserable and insufficient; for it is God's 
decree that nothing short of Himself should fill or satisfy 
the soul. If this soul be unsanctified, if its desires and 
affections be not fixed on God, then all life is a failure ; 
and all who have lived and died with everything which 
the world could give them, yet without God, might cry 
to the Christian as the soul of Gawain shrilled into the 
ear of the holy king, 

61 Farewell : there is an isle of rest for thee ; 
But I am blown along a wandering wind, 
And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight. " 

No soul, then, is sanctified which has not learnt that 
the object, and the one object, of life is not what we 
have — for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
of things which he possesseth ; and not what we are — 
for our wretched little gifts and attainments are abso- 
lutely nothing unto God, except in so far as they be 
used for the good of others ; but what we do and what we 
speak — affections set on things above — the soul which 
is athirst for God, and the one hope that, however 
unworthy we be, and however imperfect, we may still 
be suffered to make our brethren better and not worse, 
and to spread God's kingdom among men. 

III. And so we come to the best, the highest, the 
divinest part of man — man's spirit, which is none other 
than the Spirit of God within him. In one sense it 
needs not to be sanctified, being itself sacred ; but it 
needs to be sanctified in the sense of being preserved 



xxxv.] THE TRIPLE SANCTIFICATION. 355 

from the contagion and the conquest of the body and 
the mind. For the spirit may be quenched, though it 
cannot be sophisticated ; and it may be overpowered, 
though it cannot be depraved. Our sins never arise 
because we are too ignorant to know our duty, but 
because we are too weak to do it. When a boy dis- 
graces himself by any form of sin, it is never because 
he does not know better, but because, being weak as 
water, he cannot excel, and because his spirit has no 
power over the impulse of the body or the temptation 
of the mind. Only do not think that weakness is a 
plea, or infirmity an excuse ; nay, since you might be 
strong and not weak, such weakness is a sin, and such 
infirmity a shame ; and if we cannot teach you this, life 
will teach it you by very rude and very agonising shocks. 
Nature, at any rate, accepts no idle promises, and listens 
to no weak excuses ; and he who " will not be taught by 
the rudder must be taught by the rock." So that if you 
would shun this utter shipwreck, you must, by prayer, 
and penitence, and thoughtfulness, and humility, see 
that your spirit controls the warring lusts of the body 
and purifies the wandering affections of the soul. If 
not, yours will be one more of those wretched dual lives 
we see ; the lives that face both ways ; the lives rent by 
a fatal schism of disunion ; the lives which are like bells 
jangled out of tune ; the lives perfectly clear in their 
convictions, utterly contemptible in their actions. And 
oh, let me earnestly w T arn you against the fatal delusion 
that such a dual, such a divided, such a disharmonious 
life as this, is enough for God ; that there is either virtue 
or religion in this miserable moral see-saw : that it is 
sufficient for us to do homage with our lips to w 7 hat is 
good, while all the w 7 hile our unregenerate hearts are 
full of worldly imagination, and our unsanctified ^bodies 

A A 2 



356 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

are made the instruments of unrighteousness. Oh, 
believe me, the spirit cannot serve God while the soul 
and the body persist in serving sin. Do you need any 
illustration of the state I mean? There was once an 
English minister, who, having designed for his king an 
act of wickedness, went home and wrote in his private 
diary a pious prayer : do you think that that was a prayer 
which God loved, and which God would hear ? There 
was once an English conspirator, who talked open infi- 
delity to all around him, and who, even on the scaffold, 
uttered the piteous words, " Oh God, if there be a God, 
save my soul, if I have a soul," who yet, the moment 
that he was left alone, was heard to fling himself on his 
knees with passionate entreaties to the very God whom 
he had just denied : do you think those prayers would 
be heard ? Ah, God is merciful, but I am quite sure 
that this is a very dangerous, a very awful, a supremely 
wretched state. Yet, is it a state wholly alien to all our 
experiences ? Have you never known a boy go straight 
out of this chapel to walk in the way of sinners and sit 
in the seat of the scornful ? Have you never known a 
boy rise from his very knees to defile his lips with 
wicked talking, and his actions with wilful sin ? Have 
you never known a boy " wet the face of a sin with a 
tear, and breathe upon it with a sigh," and fancy that he 
has prayed against it at the Holy Communion; and then 
go and plunge into it recklessly again, and go through 
the same farce once more ? Why is this ? It is because 
he deceives himself ; it is because he is not living up to 
his light ; not obeying the best part of his nature ; not 
allowing his spirit- — which means his reason and his 
conscience — to be the supreme guide of his life. It 
means too often that, both bodily and mentally, he has 
fallen into bad habits ; and that " habit can, in direct 



xxxv.] THE TRIPLE SANGTIFIGATION. 357 

opposition to every conviction of the mind, and even 
but little aided by the elements of temptation, induce a 
repetition of unworthy actions." And if you feel, any 
one of you, that this is your state, then realise at once 
your danger and your duty : your duty, because your 
present life is a violation of ail that God in His mercy 
intended for you ; your danger, because if this be con- 
tinued, it can only end in moral death. Oh, " great is 
the effort, great, and not so easy as it seems, to be good 
and not bad." If you would be sanctified, learn to be 
discontent with your dishonour, ashamed of your weak- 
ness, penitent for your sins. Arise in tears, and go to 
your Father; arise in shame and remorse, and cast 
yourself at your Saviour's feet. Struggle on, and deal 
very sternly with yourselves. Walk very humbly with 
your God. Struggle on, if it be only inch by inch, till 
the rout is resistance, and the resistance victory. I 
could not tell you to do this if you had to struggle- 
unaided : but it is not so. Stronger is He that is with 
you than he that is against you. God is with you ; His 
will is your sanctification. For you Christ died. May 
He — I pray it with my whole heart — may He sanctify 
you wholly, body, soul, and spirit. Yonder Holy Table, 
yonder loving Communion, yonder memorial of His 
body broken and His blood shed for you, is the pledge 
of His desire to save you. Faithful is He that calleth 
you, who also will do it. 
November 7, IS 76. 



SEKMON XXXVI. 
TRUTHFULNESS AND HONESTY, 

Ps. li. 6. 
" But lo, Thou requirest truth in the inward parts. 

I. You all remember how, in the first book of the 
Bible, there is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 
and the first tendency to sin is to linger in its neigh- 
bourhood, and the first impulse to sin is to look at it 
as a tree to be desired, and the first act of sin is to 
pluck its fruit. On that tree of death we will not look 
to-day. In the last book of the Bible there is another 
tree—a tree planted by the river of the water of life, 
in the midst of the Paradise of God, — a tree whose 
leaves are for the healing of the nations. And the 
path to this tree is open ; the fiery sword of the cheru- 
bim does not wave around it, nor asp creep under its 
shadow, nor awful mandates warn us from it. Nay, 
but we are invited, we are bidden, to draw near to it 
by heavenly voices, and to pluck from it 

" A perpetual feast of nectared sweets, 
Where no crude surfeit reigns. " 

II. It bears twelve manner of fruit, and to-day I want 
you to pluck one of them — the fruit of truthfulness. 
All the fruits of the Spirit which this tree bears grow 
very close to each other; nay, they touch each other 



serm. xxxvi.] TRUTHFULNESS AND HONESTY. 359 

on the same stem, and where one grows the others are 
rarely wanting. This is the sole resemblance between 
the tree of life and the upas of evil. Indulge but 
one sin 3 and that sin by a fatal law engenders others ; 
cherish but one virtue, and its diffusive healthiness will 
sweeten and purify the whole spirit. In the career of 
that criminal who now lies in prison awaiting the death 
due to his revolting crime we have a fearful illustration 
how one vice — in his case inordinate vanity — brought 
a promising and high-spirited boy first to sensuality, 
then to cruelty, then to horrible murder, and so to a 
shameful fate and an execrated name. 1 So it is that 
when but one vice has betrayed the wicket- gate, a 
hundred devils rush in and take possession of the fort. 
But the other — the sweeter, the more blessed truth — 
is that, even so, one virtue fairly, honestly, rigidly fol- 
lowed may be a safeguard and a defence — may be a 
fortress of impregnable refuge against every assault of 
the enemy — may be an inch of rock amid the waste of 
angry waters. This I hope will become partly clear 
when I have spoken of one virtue to-day — the virtue 
of truthfulness. 

III. Let us begin at the very lowest step. I have 
known some natures to which a lie was a thing simply 
impossible. They could not lie if they would ; they 
would not if they could. In the very clearness of their 
eyes, in the very openness of their faces, you may see 
a transparent truthfulness — an utter impossibility of 
anything serpentine and base. Hopeful, manly, noble 
natures these ! Even if they go astray, they have one 
strong anchor to save them from drifting to perdition : 
one indissoluble chain to tie them to the shore. I 
thank God that truthfulness has ever been held a right 

1 Wainwright. 



360 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

English virtue, and that every Englishman worthy the 
name of Englishman would echo the lines of the poet — 

" Thou hast "betrayed thy nature, and thy name, 
Not rendering true answer, as beseems 
Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight : 
* * * * # 

This is a shameful thing for men to lie." 

Ask the brightest virtue of our English Alfred, and 
Asser will tell you that it was truthfulness ; ask the 
chief characteristic of the good Lord Falkland, and 
Clarendon will record that he abhorred the semblance 
of falsity; ask the most prominent strength of the 
great Duke of Wellington, and Gleig will answer, " He 
always told the truth." But though we may be proud 
of truth-telling as a national virtue, yet all good men 
hav© loved it. Take the Jews. "As for lies," says 
David, " I hate and abhor them." Take the Eomans. 
When a man had pledged his word to Hannibal that 
he would return, and, going back to the camp for a 
moment on some trivial pretext, returned no more, the 
Eomans, because though he had kept the promise to 
the ear Iiq had broken it to the sense, branded him 
with the just ignominy of their contempt. Take the 
Greeks. Of their noblest — of Aristides and Epami- 
nondas — we are expressly told that they would never, 
even in boyish sport, say what was other than the fact. 
The house of Glaucus, the son of Epicydes, is torn 
up, root and branch, because he had even meditated a 
lie ; and at the very dawn of poetry the old Greek bard 
exclaims — 

exOpos yap /jlol kuvos 0/j.cos 'Ai'Sao irvXevcrw . . . 
" Who dares think one thing and another tell, 
My soul detests him as the gates of hell." 

Nor has it been otherwise in modern history. When 
the Emperor Sigismund, at the Council of Constance, 
is charged with having broken his word to Huss, there, 



xxxvi.] TRUTHFULNESS AND HONESTY. 361 

before prelates and princes, it is visible to every one in 
that vast hall how the blush mantles on his guilty 
cheek ; and all goes ill with Harold after he has broken 
his oath to the Norman ; and it is all down-hill and ruin 
with Francis the First w r hen he has violated the treaty 
of Madrid. And shall English boys, the sons of the 
gallant gentlemen who have made England what she 
is — shall English boys degenerate into the shame and 
cowardice of falsehood ? God forbid ! And when — as 
sometimes, alas ! happens — an English boy can look you 
in the face, with all the air of openness, with all the 
affectation perhaps of injured innocence, with all the 
semblance perhaps of just indignation, — and w 7 ill, to 
rebut a charge, or to parry a suspicion, — knowing, as he 
does know, that his word will be taken — will look you 
in the face and tell you a lie (a thing which he cannot 
do, unless everything wholesome in his nature has been 
sapped by that effeminate cowardice, which is the 
leprosy of the weakest and the feeblest of natures) — 
I say when an English boy can do this, there is nothing 
which so all but drives one to despise him, all but 
compels one to despair of him. I hardly know what 
can become of such a boy ; I can but dimly read the 
prophecy of one more to join the miserable multitude 
of the world's living dead ; of those who live for evil 
and not for good ; of those through whose selfishness 
and through whose corruption the world is a world of 
misery and shame. From being such as this I utterly 
acquit the vast majority of you. If it were ever 
conceivable that England could train many of such a 
breed, then 

" Bear me from the harbour's mouth, 
Wild wind. I seek another sky. 
And I will see before I die 
The palms and temples of the south." 



SS2 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

IV. Yes ; but consider, is there not " a manslaughter 
upon truth/' as well as a murder ? Are there not more 
who, though they could not thus lie deliberately and 
designedly and in cold blood, are not so strong in virtue, 
so armed in the " hauberk's twisted mail " of sturdy 
integrity, as never to be surprised into a falsehood. As 
timid creatures fly from danger into the nearest refuge, 
so too often if a boy has committed some, perhaps even 
a quite venial fault, a sudden question (which I, for my 
part, think it my duty never to ask) may startle him 
into a denial which is a lie. Put him on his guard, and 
the boy who has any honesty in him at all w T ill be safe 
at least from this worst aggravation of the offence ; but 
do you not see how far braver, stronger, more hopeful, 
is a nature that could not even in the first instance, 
under any surprise, thus run its head into the strangling 
noose of falsehood, but at once, but naturally, but in- 
evitably, but instinctively, but at whatever cost, tells 
the truth and shames the devil ? Now what I w^ould 
urge on you to-day is — now in this sacred place, here in 
the sight of God — to register a resolve in heaven that as 
for you, come what will, you will never stain your soul, 
you will never burden your life, you will never wound 
your conscience, with a lie. Oh, block up, I entreat you, 
in your souls not only every avenue, but every lane, 
and byepath, and little winding way to falsehood. 
And do not be content with the vow that no lie shall 
ever defile your lips, but nothing which has the most 
distant odour or complexion of a lie ; no half lie or 
quarter lie; no sneaking subterfuge; no bragging 
exaggeration; no prevaricating ambiguity; no stam- 
mering suggestion ; no half confession ; no lie which, 
because it is half the truth, is ever the greatest of lies. 
And oh ! if any one of you has ever given a promise 



xxxvr.] TRUTHFULNESS AND HONESTY. 363 

to your father, or mother, or brother, or master for your 
good, consider that promise as a pledge, made for your 
own protection, in the very hearing of your God ; and 
let your word be as your bond, and your bond be as 
your oath, and that oath sworn on the inviolable altar 
of your hearts. Let that promise be as a strong chain 
to bind you to integrity : let it be as a vast barrier to 
screen you from temptation. And, as a part of this 
subject, let me, as my distinct duty, however painful, 
warn you with all affection, but with all honest plain- 
ness and in no doubtful words, against that dishonesty, 
that unfairness, that (let us here at all events call things 
by their right plain English names) — that cheating in 
work which, deceive yourselves about it as you will, saps 
all honest industry, defrauds your fellows of their just 
dues, and proves a boy to be unworthy of the confidence 
w\hich is, and which I hope always will be, placed in 
him till he has justly forfeited it. With this it is per- 
fectly shocking to think that even the dullest and most 
ignorant of you should feel a spark of sympathy, because 
it is nothing more or less than a mean thing, a blot and 
a stain upon anyone's character, — into which a boy may 
perhaps fall once from weakness and thoughtlessness, 
and not from radical falsity, but into which if any 
boy who has a conscience does fall, he will at least be 
most heartily ashamed of it, and feel for it a sincere 
and bitter repentance. That such practices, if unchecked, 
must simply ruin for life anyone of you hereafter — that 
they would earn you the contempt even of a man of 
the world of ordinary honour, — this is bad enough ; but 
it is even worse to have in the character a poisonous 
fibre which may make a whole life shifty and worthless. 
I have known boys — thrown in large schools at eight 



S64 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

years old — placed in forms where not one boy was free 
from this miserable meanness, — and yet never led for 
one moment to make either of those wretched excuses 
which are so often made — either that the examination 
was so important, which makes the fraud only greater, 
or that it was so unimportant, which only makes the 
temptation less — but able to say that not from that 
early childhood have they ever shown up one word 
which was not most strictly their own, or got one mark 
which they had not most honestly deserved. I am sure 
that many of you could say the same, and I am sure 
also that I could name those that could. But oh ! that 
every one of you could say it ; or, if it has not been so 
hitherto, that you w 7 ould vow that henceforth you will 
scorn dishonesty as a base and slavish thing. I do most 
confidently hope that the coming examination will not 
be stained by one single instance of this un-English and 
mean offence. If there be decadence, as men say there 
is, in the proud old honesty of England — if there be 
forgery and swindling in our commercial enterprises — 
if there be adulteration and trickery in our trade — if 
among foreign nations the word of an Englishman is 
no longer as his bond — if, as the blood of martyrs has 
shown, the villanies of people who call themselves our 
countrymen have come to be distrusted by the very 
savages of the Pacific, — then let every one who has the 
honour of England at heart see that faith, and honour, 
and fairness, and simplicity, and honesty, and any other 
noble name we like to call it — in one word, see that 
truthfulness be as the very girdle of the loins of English 
boys. 

V. I have left myself no time to show you how 
falsity in word or action gives, a crookedness to the 



xxxvi.l TRUTHFULNESS AND HONESTY. 365 

whole character ; but you may be sure of this, that it 
does lead, and that quite inevitably, to self-delusion and 
hypocrisy — to a cheating of ourselves and a cheating 
of God. 

" To thine own self be true, 
And it shall follow as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man. " 

Now to be true to yourself is to know that you were 
made for virtue, made for integrity, made to keep your 
body in sanctification and honour, made a child of God 
and an heir of heaven ; and that to be either indolent or 
wicked, to either waste your own blessings, like the 
beasts which perish, or to add to the sin and sorrow of 
others, like the evil spirits of the pit, is to personate 
another, not yourself, and to give the lie to your nature 
and to your God. And the reason why the truthful man 
is the less likely to do this is because he is the less likely 
to lie to himself. Some natures are so false that they 
" partly take themselves for true : " such dupes of their 
own worthlessness, that they do not realise that their 
course of life is morally detestable. Why is this ? 
partly because they make lying excuses to themselves ; 
partly because all the vile work of their lives is done in 
the back places and dark closets of their own natures, 
where, since no ray of God's eternity can pierce, they 
hide themselves in their most interior secrecy. But the 
honest man when he errs most deeply will still be 
honest about it — he at least will tell no lies about his 
sin either to himself or to his God. Oh ! it is an awful 
thing to stand as a guilty soul before the eye of God ; 
but he will stand there with more of hope and less of 
shame, who cannot " smile, and smile, and be a villain " 
— who has often set himself before himself, and forced 



366 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH [serm. xxxvi. 

himself to say " that shameful thing art thou." For he 
whose "conscience— that can see without light — sits in 
the Areopagus of his heart, surveying his thoughts, and 
condemning their obliquities/' he, even when he stumbles, 
has not lost his hold of a guiding hand ; he has that 
which David desired so passionately, and which saved 
David even in his worst extremities — he has truth — 
truth in the inward parts. 

December 12, 1875. 



SERMON XXXVII. 
SCHOOL GAMES. 

Zech. v ii. 5. 

"And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in 

the streets thereof." 

The prophet is speaking here of restored Jerusalem, 
and as he summons up the image of its future 
happiness, his kindly eye dwells for a moment, in 
prophetic vision, on the games of the young in its 
bright rejoicing streets. He contemplates them with 
unmingled pleasure ; without one touch of obtrusive 
sadness, or of ungenial cynicism. It is not altogether 
a healthy sign in our English poet, when, on revisiting 
the fields where once his 

" Careless childhood played, 
A stranger yet to pain," 

he can only say with a sigh, of the lads whom he sees 
on the banks of the Thames, that they are like victims 
playing regardless of their doom, and then draws a 
melancholy picture of the misfortunes of the future 
which lie in ambush for them, — passion, and falsehood, 
and remorse, and poverty, and the painful family of 
death. A truer and healthier feeling breathes through 



368 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

the lines of the sweet poet of the Christian Year, who, 
though he begins by the somewhat saddening thought, 

" The heart of childhood is all mirth, 
"We frolic to and fro, 
As free and blithe, as if on earth 
Were no such thing as wo," 

yet proceeds to speak of a life enriched by such hope, 
and joy, and peace in believing, such brotherhood of 
a loving Saviour's sympathy, such tenderness of a 
Heavenly Father's love, as will enable the boy to sing 
his morning song all through the weary day of the 
world's strife, — as will make his age like the rich glow 
round the autumnal sun, and will enable him to look 
beyond the grave for a bliss which heart hath not 
conceived. 

II. I think you all know that it is in this latter 
spirit, — with this warm and cordial sympathy, — with 
this faithful and untroubled hope, — that we here look 
upon your games. It is this that, to me at any rate, 
makes it a beautiful and exhilarating sight — now alas ! 
more than ever — to see our cricket-field so lively with 
its hundreds of cricketers in the sunshine of a summer 
afternoon. Too often, amid the burdens of manhood, 
we are apt to be like the peevish children in the market- 
place to whom the gladness of boyhood appeals in vain ; 
but it is not lightly, least of all is it with any desire 
whatever to answer you according to your idols, if I 
call it a national blessing that there are two vigorous 
games to absorb the superfluous energy and occupy the 
abundant holidays of English schools. The great Duke 
hardly went too far who, when he saw the boys at 
football under the ancient elms of Eton, said, " It was 
here that Waterloo was won!" These games undoubtedly 
do educate, or may be made to educate, much that is 



xxxvi.] SCHOOL GAMES. 309 

manly in the best and truest sense. There is a manli- 
ness which is identical with virtue ; and there is — as 
usual — a certain spurious semblance of manliness — the 
devil's counterfeit of it — which I call mannishness. 
By manly I mean all that is eager, hearty, fearless, 
modest, pure ; by mannish I mean that which apes the 
poorest externals of the lowest types of men — the 
premature swagger of folly, and the odious precocity of 
vice. And it would indeed be deplorable if the devil, 
and the devil's agents, thrust their debasing influences 
into our English games, as they always do try to thrust 
themselves into all good things. If, through the idle- 
ness and emptiness of the vicious and the dull, all the 
detestable machinery of low betting, lounging, drinking, 
and worldliness in its worst sense, ever gets mixed up 
with the athletic sports of our schools and universities, 
all that is most valuable in those sports will be gone. 
May that day be far distant, and may we so do our 
duty that it may never come &t all ! 

III. I am going then to speak to you a few words 
about games, nor do I think it in the least degree 
needful to apologise for such a topic, as though it were 
as much beneath the dignity of the pulpit as it is alien 
from its conventionalities. The true, the only dignity 
of the pulpit which I can recognise comes from the 
desire to do good by speaking words which are real, 
and which even the youngest hearers may understand. 
And in drawing my subject from the circumstances of 
your common life, I do but humbly follow the highest 
examples. The prophets, the apostles did the same. Is 
it David the shepherd ? He sings of " the ewes great 
with young ones," and his dreams of happiness are the 
green pastures and the still waters. Is it Ezekiel the 
priest ? He dwells on the incense of the temple and 

M.S E B 



370 IJS THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



the smoke of the sacrifice. Is it John the hermit ? 
His words ring with the imagery of the desert — the rock, 
the serpent, the barren tree. And why need I speak of 
these ? Did not Jesus Himself take His subjects and His 
illustrations from the commonest incidents of common 
life ? Did He not speak of the whitening harvests and 
springing flowers, and the reed shaking by the river, 
and torn clothes and lost pennies, and eggs, and pearls, 
and fish, and weddings, and funerals, and grumbling 
labourers, and reapers amid the wheat and tares ? Did 
He not rejoice in life's joys no less than He grieved 
over its sorrows, and did not the kindly and the kingly 
eyes, which were so often dim with tears amid earth's 
mourners, shine with a brighter glow as they watched 
the games of happy little ones in the green fields beside 
the silver sea ? 

IV. You spend many hours this term at cricket. 
You call this term " the cricketing term." The thought 
of this game is very prominent in your estimate of 
school life, and it is hardly possible to live among you 
without knowing how much you talk of it. And all 
this is thoroughly natural. If there are some people 
who deplore, some who are indignant at, some who 
cannot understand it, that is because this prominence 
of athletics is not free from dangers. Those dangers — 
to which I shall only allude but slightly — are partly 
general, partly individual ; and though I think that by 
God's blessing we are largely able to avoid them, yet 
we must not deny that they exist. A boy, for instance, 
is often in danger of wholly overestimating the value of 
his own athletic success. Many of the best men — like 
Bishop Coleridge Pattison — have been good cricketers, 
and so have been, and are, many of the best boys I have 
ever known ; but yet the physical gifts which may make 



xxxv!.] SCHOOL GAMES. 371 



a successful cricketer are not, you must remember, 
incompatible with — and not once or twice only have I 
seen them combined with — much that is utterly hateful 
and utterly contemptible ; so that if it be * absurd and 
wrong to be vain of any gift, it is more than ever absurd 
and wrong to be vain of those which are among the 
lowest Then too there is a second danger lest games, 
— not so much in the actual time spent over them, as 
in the endless and not very fruitful gossiping about 
them afterwards, — should degenerate into serious waste 
of time, which a boy, whose future must depend on his 
own exertions, may regret and rue for life. There is, 
again, a real danger of foolish partisanships, — ungenerous 
dislikes, — miserable jealousies, — evil surmises, — perverse 
disputings. Once more, there is a constant danger of 
extravagant and foolish misjudgments, which utterly 
lose sight of the relative values and importance of things, 
so that a boy who, from any circumstance, is not, to 
use your common phrase, "good at games," is quite 
ludicrously underrated, perhaps even despised, defrauded 
of his legitimate influence. Now while you play with 
all heartiness, do not forget that games, however useful 
and delightful, are not of first-rate, not even of third, 
fourth, or fifth — scarcely even of tenth-rate importance 
in comparison with higher things. If any one were 
asked to name the most famous living M arlburian, a man 
whose works are read wherever the English language 
is read, he would name one, who, when he was a boy 
here twenty years ago, certainly never touched a bat ; 
and there may be at this very moment, on those benches, 
some boy, whom you don't think much of now because 
he is " no good at games," of whom thousands of future 
Marlburians may be proud as having reflected lustre on 
their school, when the very names and existence have 

B B 2 



372 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

been forgotten of whole generations of boys who kicked 
numberless bases and won enormous scores. Well, 
against these dangers — of vanity, of wasted time, un- 
chivalrous rivalries, attaching of exaggerated importance, 
undue and silly contempt for those who care only for 
other things — we must all be on our guard. I am sure 
that most of you are on your guard against them ; and 
then, if I am not much mistaken, all that remains is good. 
V. How much good is there, for instance, in the mere 
enjoyment, pure and simple, which our field on a sum- 
mer afternoon represents. When we further bear in mind 
what an immunity this enjoyment secures to us from 
unhealthy lounging, aimless idleness, and vicious mis- 
chief, — when we remember how many excellent qualities 
it may help to bring inta play — it seems to stand on 
still higher grounds ; but even if there were nothing 
more in it than harmless, hearty, happy occupation, 
it would be a thing at which all may rejoice who look 
at life with the eye of faith and love. Only let one 
ray of God's sunlight— rthe sunlight of a pure and 
faithful heart — fall on this natural gladness, and how 
bright may it become ! If the profane old man of the 
great comedy, on his death-bed, " babbled of green 
fields," how much more sweetly to you in after life, — 
perhaps as you faint on the arid plains of India, perhaps 
as you toil in the dingy back streets of great cities, 
amid haunts of poverty and crime — may come the 
memory of sunny cricket grounds where once you 
played. Like a draught of clear water in the desert 
— like that sparkling cup which his warriors brought 
to David from the well which he had loved in boyhood 
— you will drink of the innocent delights of these 
school-days, and will take heart of courage, and remem- 
ber how you learnt in your youth that God is a loving 



xxxvi.] SCHOOL GAMES. 



and a tender Father, who, if He asked your service, 
asked it only for your good ; and if He said, " My 
son, give Me thy heart/' desired it, not because you can 
do anything for Him, but solely out of His love for you, 
and that He might save that boyish heart ere the evil 
days had come, from the vice which seduces, from the 
shame which crushes, from the agony which tortures, 
from the temptation which betrays. 

VI. But, as I said, there is something more in our 
games than this mere happiness — good as that is. For, 
even from your games, you may learn some of those 
true qualities which will help you to do your duty 
bravely and happily in life. No one can be a good 
cricketer who does not practise — who does not take 
trouble — who is not glad to amend faulty ways of 
playing — who does not attend to rules. And in a yet 
better and higher sense, no one can make a first-rate 
cricketer if he is not ready, and steady, and quick, 
and bold ; if he is not trained to bear a reverse with 
a perfectly good-humoured smile ; if he is not free from 
the self-consciousness which is usually called being 
nervous ; if he has not the pluck, and the patience, and 
the good humour, and the self-control to play out 
tenaciously to the very last a losing game, ready to 
accept defeat, but trying to the end to turn it into 
victory. Well, believe me, you want the very same 
good qualities in the great cricket-field of life. There 
too — in high moral and spiritual matters which affect 
eternity itself — it does not do to be for a single 
moment off your guard; — there too neglect and care- 
lessness produce disgraceful catastrophes ; — there too 
either over self-confidence on the one hand, or deficient 
nerve on the other, will end in certain defeat ; — there 
too it is cowardice to be demoralised by the first sign 



374 IN TEE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of apparent failure ; — there too the highest courage is 
often shown by sticking to the very last to a failing cause ; 
— there too you must be ready at all times to give way to 
others, and not expect to have all the batting or all the 
bowling to yourself; — there too you may be unsuccess- 
ful without any fault of yours, and if it be God's will 
that thus for you the chance should be over, and the 
wickets fall, almost before you have well taken your 
stand, you must step from your place, not with despair, 
not with anger, least of all with the angry gesture and 
passionate curse of disappointed vanity, but bravely, 
and quietly, and with a manly and cheerful heart. 

VII. Yes, life is a game ; a complicated game ; a 
difficult game ; a game which requires wisdom, diligence, 
patience ; a game of which you must learn the con- 
ditions ; a game which will try your powers ; a game in 
which there is not one good quality of head or heart 
that will not greatly help you ; a game of which the 
forfeits are terrible, of which the issues are infinite. " It 
has been played for untold ages, and every one of us is 
one of the players in it." The rules of it have been 
made independently of us, but they are absolute, and 
we must obey them. Those rules are the laws of nature, 
the laws of health, the laws of intellect, above all, the 
moral laws of God. If we violate them from mistake, 
or from ignorance, some allowance may be made for us ; 
none, if we defy them wilfully. Obey them, — and by 
prayer and the grace which your Saviour will give, you 
can obey them, — and you must and w T ill find peace unto 
your souls. Disobey them, and you make of life a 
misery, and of death a ruin. But there is one respect 
in which the game of life differs from our earthly games. 
In these there is always an element of chance ; in the 
game of life there is none. He who keeps the high 



xxxvi.] SCHOOL GAMES. 



and simple rules of it must win. He may seem indeed 
to lose, He may seem to die broken-hearted, in indi- 
gence, obloquy, failure. Fools may think his life mad- 
ness, and his end to be without honour ; but he has 
won, and more than won, for he is counted among the 
children of G-od, and his lot is among the saints. So 
that in this respect it is not with life as with your 
games at cricket. There a player may have done his 
very best, but if he has made no score, you do not cheer 
him, and, his chance being over, he walks in silence 
up the steps. Not so when any faithful player — even 
the humblest — leaves the game of life. He may leave 
it, not only amid the world's silence, but even amid its 
execrations ; he may leave it to join 

" The crowd untold 
Of men, by the cause they served unknown, 
Who moulder in myriad graves of old — 
Never a story and never a stone ; " 

but as his last breath ebbs away, be it even in a sigh of 
sorrow, be it even with a groan of agony, how joyfully 
does the guardian angel utter the record, "He has done 
his best ! ,? And then, upwards, and ever upwards, peals 
even to the glimmering summit, the glad answer, " He 
has done his best ! " and so at last, while 

" They stand, those walls of Zion, 
All jubilant with soug, 
And bright with many an angel, 
And all the martyr throng, " 

he who has lost his life for Christ's sake, finds it. The 
poor failure of earth becomes the high success of heaven. 
He hears a voice he knows, a voice which thrills into 
his inmost soul, and oh ! he cannot mistake it. It is the 
voice of his Saviour, heard far amid the crowding 
Immortalities of Heaven, and it says " Servant of God, 
well done ! " 
May 14, 1876 



SEEMON XXXVII. 

FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE.— THE PRODIGAL'S 

RETURN. 

Luke xv. 18. 
" I will arise and go to my father." 

I. From innocence to sin, — from sin to sorrow, — is there 
any one soul in this congregation which is not so far at 
least, — it may be to very different extents, but still to 
some extent — acquainted with this path of the prodigal ? 
Which of us must not confess that he has gone astray 
like a sheep that is lost ? which of us cannot testify 
that no jot or tittle of God's word has in his case fallen 
to the ground, but that every step away from God is a 
step in the road to death ? But this third stage in the 
soul's journey— the path from sorrow to penitence — 
have we all trodden that ? "I have sinned with Peter, 
not wept with Peter," was the dying wail of the cruel 
bishop. Are there none of us who must confess we 
have wandered like the prodigal, but we have not with 
him repented, — w r e have not, like him, returned? Yet 
many of us, I trust, have trodden that path of penitence. 
Oh, may every soul which has not trodden it begin to 
tread it now ; may God grant that even these poor and 
feeble words — the last, except it may be a few words of 
farewell, that I shall ever utter in this position from 



serm. xxxvii.] FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE. 377 

this place, to this congregation — -may be so blessed by 
His Holy Spirit as to help some soul here to find 
its Saviour, — to return from darkness to light, from 
the power of Satan unto God. May God grant it for 
His dear Son's sake ! 

II. We left him in the depths of his degradation,- — 
his penal degradation, — the degradation which was the 
inevitable consequence of his sins, — this once gay and 
happy boy ; we left him seated in his hunger, in his 
loneliness, afar from the God whom he had forsaken, 
abandoned of the companions by whom he had been 
betrayed, a lost soul, a ruined life. Sin, revealing itself 
to him, as sooner or later it does to all, in its native 
hideousness, took no further pains to make him believe 
in its charm or beauty. Active agencies and strong 
deceptions are needful only at the first ; but when 
temptation has done its work, habit may be left to 
continue, and despair to finish it. Vice must come at 
first in full attractiveness — it must come to the boy in 
the guise of a friend, bold and radiant, with a smile on 
the face and light in the eye ; — to the youth with all the 
mysterious enchantments of Circean beauty and Siren 
songs. But she comes very differently to the gloomy, 
to the fallen, to the suffering, to the disillusioned man. 
When she has once won her victim Sin may come 
undisguisedly as Death; being no longer a temptress to 
dupe, but a fury to scourge the soul, she may heap 
upon it the chains of its iniquities, and grate and 
clang upon its prison-house the locks and bars of hell. 

III. But, thanks be to God, again and again are the 
prisoners delivered — again and again does the malice of 
Satan overreach itself. Because w^e are made in God's 
image, which we may deface and desecrate, but never 
quite lose; — because He has placed the light of 



378 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



His Holy Spirit, as a lamp in our souls, which may 
smoulder, but never quite be quenched ; — because we are 
His sons, and even when we have made ourselves 
slaves in some far country, can never quite become its 
citizens ; — because we cannot sink so low as not to 
feel that we were born for G-od and for heaven, not for 
foul offices and swinish husks, — therefore not seldom is 
the spoiler reft of his victims. The soul which he had 
drugged, and well-nigh slain, shakes off its torpor ; 
there come back to it the stirrings of its old strength ; 
it tears off its fetters ; a power not its own bursts the 
gates of brass and smites the bars of iron in sunder; 
and in spite of the thraldom of habit, in spite of the 
power of Satan, the duped, degraded, imprisoned soul 
is free. 

IV. The prodigal " came to himself." He steadily 
faced — and oh how much is there in this! — he steadily 
faced his true position. He had left his home, and his 
father, and his mother, and the innocence of his early 
years ; he had sought independence, and found slavery • 
had sought friends, and found tyrants and traitors ; had 
sought pleasure, and found agony; had sought plenty 
and ... importance, and had found famine, detestable 
humiliation, and the husks of swine. Was this to be 
the end ? Was his life worth nothing more than to be 
thus sacrificed ? Ah no ! He came to himself. The 
child who had played in the sunlight of his father's 
love, — the clear-browed lad with no taint of evil in his 
thoughts — the favourite son, so dear, so happy, so full 
of generous purpose and unselfish life — that was him- 
self. But the loveless, thankless, graceless boy — the 
troubled, the corrupt, the dissolute youth — the companion 
of rioters and harlots — the fool who had laid waste the 
inner sanctities of his being, and squandered the highest 



xxxvn.] FROM BORROW TO REPENTANCE. 3T9 



heritage of his life — that was not himself. It was a 
guilty semblance of himself which he hated ; a hideous 
dream of himself which he despised. " How many- 
hired servants of my father/' he thought, " have bread 
enough and to spare; but I — I a son, a loved son, 
—iyco Se aTroWvfiai — I am perishing, am being 
destroyed." And as the thought of all he had been, 
of all he might have been, and all he was, came over 
him, there came too a thought of all that he yet 
might be. Like a soiled robe there dropped off from 
him the bad memories and base temptations of the last 
few years. A breath of vernal and holy hope came to 
him like a breeze of Eden beating balm upon a fevered 
brow. He was no longer the runaway, the self- 
destroyer, the boy of whom they could only think 
with a blush of shame; — but again he was a much- 
loved child in the dear old home ; — again the roses of 
the garden bloomed around him ; — again he mingled a 
pure voice in hymns and prayers; — again a mother's 
kiss was not sullied on his cheek, nor the hand of a 
father laid in blessing on an unworthy head. The 
calls of olden promise and olden prophecy came back 
to him. From the page of Holy Writ the voices 
whispered to him, " Eeturn unto me, for I have re- 
deemed thee " — " Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways, 
for why will ye die ?" — " Eeturn, ye backsliding children, 
and I will heal your backslidings." And to these 
voices he listened. The fixed thought — eyco Se dnoWv/xac 
— became the blessed resolve — avaaras iropevaofxai. 
" I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto 
him, Father ! " — and oh ! surely in that word there will 
be a touching appeal — " Father, I have sinned." — Yes ! 
I will open my heart to him ; I will make no excuses ; 
I will conceal nothing ; I will confess all. And since I 



380 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



dare not hope, I hardly venture to desire, that all will 
be as before, I will say, " I am no more worthy " — 
I was worthy once, but alas ! ovtciri — " I am no longer 
worthy to be called thy son, — make me as one of thy 
hired servants." He deserves to suffer — that he feels ; 
he has no wish to escape from the consequences of his 
past misdeeds; no subtle desire to retain one guilty 
pleasure or false freedom of the past — He knows 
that 

" Hearts which verily repent 
Are burdened with impurity 
And comforted by chastisement ; 
That punishment's the best to bear 
Which follows soonest on the sin, 
And guilt's a game where losers fare 
Better than those who seem to win." 

Ay, here, my brethren, you have an answer to the 
question, What constitutes repentance ? It is a change 
of heart which confesses and amends. It says, " I 
have sinned ; " and makes no excuse, and accepts all 
consequences. Not as Pharaoh said, " I have sinned/' 
and did the same thing again and again. Not as 
Balaam said, " I have sinned/' yet proceeded from bad 
to worse. Not as Saul said, " I have sinned," yet laid 
the blame on others, and wished still to be honoured 
before the elders of the people. Not as Judas said, " I 
have sinned," and plunged into despair. No, not as 
these ; but as Achan said, " I have sinned," and made 
full restitution ; and as David said, " I have sinned ; 
let me now fall into the hands of God, and not into the 
hands of men ; " and as Job said, " I have sinned ; ^yhat 
shall I do for thee, oh ! thou Preserver of men ?" With 
these penitent souls it is not the agony of consequences 
that they care for, but the shame of wrong-doing ; it is 
not the remorse of despair, but the godly sorrow for 



xxxvil] FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE. 381 

unworthiness. It is like the sorrow of that poor penitent 
which an English poet, himself a penitent, has so 
touchingly expressed : — 

" She sat and wept beside His feet : the weight 
Of sin oppressed her heart, for all the blame 
And the poor malice of the worldly shame 
To her were past, extinct, and out of date ; 
Only the sin remained — the leprous state. 
***** 

She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair 
Still wiped the feet she was so blessed to touch, 
And He wiped off the soiling of despair 
From her sweet soul, because she loved so much." 

And so — vearning more than all for his father's love — 
the prodigal arose. If his thought was followed by a 
resolve, his resolve also was followed by an action. It 
was not only confession and self-humiliation, it was 
immediate return to God, immediate abandonment of 
sin, which proved his sincerity. There was no delay ; 
no procrastination ; no dallying with the past ; no 
looking back to the doomed glittering city ; no going 
over the old sins under the plea of penitence, and growing 
half guilty in the thoughts again. Ah ! my brethren, 
remember this ; we are not sorry, not truly, not 
savingly sorry for sin, unless we do as much as even 
Ahab and Judas did, viz., abandon the fruits of it. And 
the prodigal did abandon it. He turned his back for 
ever on the scenes of his shame and sin ; he arose and 
came to his father. 

V. You must not think that it cost him nothing. 
Penitence is not a thing which costs no effort. Oh ! if 
it were, who would not repent ? It is not easy ; oh ! it 
is not easy to repent. Nothing but God's grace could 
enable us to do it. He alone can break the iron sinew 
in the neck of our pride. To confess that we have been 
fools, and degraded fools, and it may be hypocrites as 



382 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 



well — to see how inferior we have been to the elder 
brother, whom, it may be, we have despised — to break 
off bad habits — to front the stern and dreary path 
through which alone we can reach the unific rectitude 
of a holy and self-denying life ; — it is not easy ; and it 
is, alas ! so rare that this world, like the jealous elder 
brother of the prodigal — 

' ' This world will not believe a man repents ; 
And this wise world of ours is mainly right, 
For seldom doth a man repent, and use 
Both grace and strength to pick the vicious tares 
Of blood and nature wholly out of him, 
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh." 

But, whether rare or difficult, it is thus alone that we 
can be saved. God's grace will never be wanting, only 
remember that there must be our own free will, our 
own hearty effort too. Perhaps you think that time 
will make you better. My brethren, time is nothing — 
it is a mere mode of thought ; if time does anything, it 
only makes men worse, not better. Or perhaps you 
think that sorrow will make you better. It would be 
indeed a daring blasphemy thus to challenge God to 
strike, and say I will sin till the wrath falls on me, and 
then I will repent; but though suffering will dog the heels 
of your sin, it may but make you worse, not better, even 
as tire, though it melts the gold, does but make the clay 
more hard. No ; you must repent as your own choice ; 
you must amend of your own effort ; you must listen 
to the voice wherewith God ever calls you ; you must 
think of these very words of mine to-day as a voice 
whereby to-day, while yet it is the accepted time, He 
calls you to repentance. Either this, or the end must 
be that your life — that golden, that inestimable life 
which God gave you — must come to nothing, or better 
not have been. Oh, brethren ! if your conscience tells 



xxxvii.] FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE. 383 

you that you, at this moment, are living in unrepented 
sin, then believe me, not health, not happiness, not life 
itself, is to you of importance so unspeakable as repent- 
ance : it is, it must be, to you the very work of life. 

VI. And so it was to this young prodigal. He had 
sinned ; but all the good in him had not yet been 
wasted away ; all the strength, and vigour, and, purity 
not yet quite degraded out of him. He arose, he went 
tottering and foot-sore, and with difficulty, and in 
rags, and with shame at heart, and with deep misgiving, 
and conscious that he had disgraced and destroyed him- 
self, and that, being what he had been, and having 
done what he had done, he was utterly unworthy to 
pollute with his presence that pure home ; sick at heart, 
he yet resolutely turned his face uphillward, prepared 
meekly to accept in punishment the worst that could 
befall. And along that difficult and often well-nigh 
despairing path of penitence — through its rending 
briars of strengthened temptation, and its constant 
failures of weakened will, up its steep rocks of difficulty, 
through its miry sloughs of despair — faint often and 
weary, yet upheld by steady purpose and inspiring hope, 
he struggled on. He struggled on; and at last, with a great 
leap of his heart, as he toiled to the last hill-top, far off 
in the distance, he saw his home. Ay, there it was ; the 
blue smoke rose from its clasping foliage, the quiet 
silver stream that gladdened it, the peaceful fields 
which blossomed round it, the trees under which he 
and his brother had played of old. Ah ! but there — 
within its shelter — was the mother there ? Tired of 
wishing and of waiting, had she passed, yearning for him, 
to the grave ? or was she still living, with a heart full 
of sore, sore sorrow for her son ? And the father — was 
he alive — the old man, was he well, though sorrow had 



384 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [shut. 

turned his hair to a deeper grey ? Would he receive, 
would he pity his disgraced, lost, wandering boy ? 

VII. My boys, you know that your fathers and your 
mothers love you all with a deep and a tender love, yet 
you know that sons and daughters have sometimes 
sinned against their parents, and have not been forgiven. 
I once knew a boy who had gone wilfully to a far 
country. He came back years after, absolutely penni- 
less. He came back to a friend ; to the lot of that 
friend it fell to tell him of " heart-shaking news in long- 
accumulated arrears " — to tell him that his father was 
dead, and his sister, and his brother ; and that his mother 
lived ; and to give him the means of getting home. 
He got home ; but day after day, as he wrote after- 
wards — day after day he had come up to, he had 
passed, he had walked to and fro in the twilight in 
front of the well-known door of his old home, and 
dared not knock, and dared not enter ; barely at last, 
his whole heart sick and faint within him, he sum- 
moned up courage to knock ; the door opened, and there 
was a cry of love ; he was clasped, forgiven, in his 
mother's arms. But it is not always so. Not long ago 
a father had a sailor-lad — a handsome, high-spirited, 
gallant boy. He may have been in some way to blame — 
I do not know ; but at any rate he was cruelly treated 
by his captain : he ran away from his ship, and he 
came to the country village where he lived. His father 
was an old man, a clergyman, a man who had known 
sorrow ; yet he took the boy to an upper room, locked 
him up there, and next morning, in spite of tears and 
entreaties, took him straight back to the ship he hated, 
to the captain from whom he had fled. Never again — 
and you cannot wonder at it — never again did that boy 
set foot in his father's home. 






xxxvi n.] FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE. 



VIII. But it was not so with this father in the 
parable: it is not so with our Father in heaven, for 
whom he stands. In the whole round of literature, 
divine and human, I know nothing equal to that won- 
derful outburst of impassioned and forgiving love. " And 
he arose and came to his father ; and when he was yet 
a great way off" — ah! think of that, you who feel 
within you the first stirrings of repentance — " when he 
was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had 
compassion, and ran, and fell on Ms neck, and kissed 
him," and barely left him time to sob out his " Father, 
I have sinned." Not as a slave did he receive his boy, 
but as a son ; not as an evil-doer, but as a lost child ; 
not with reproaches, but with unbounded tenderness. 
Farewell to the far country, and the cruelty, and the 
hunger, and the swine. Bring forth the robe, the white 
robe, and the ring, and shoes which he shall soil no 
longer in evil paths, and slay the fatted calf, " for this 
my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and 
is found." And he began to be glad — an ever-deepening, 
ever-increasing happiness — not the ever-deepening, ever- 
increasing hunger of that far country, with its " began 
to be in want." I do not say — mark you — that that 
gladness would never be disturbed ; I do not say that 
for him all struggles would be over ; that for him there 
would be no obstructions from the past ; that for him 
the future would not be more difficult, less peaceful, 
less tranquil in its self-mastery, than if he had never 
gone astray. " Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is 
forgiven, whose sin is covered." Oh ! far, far more 
blessed is he who has no deep sin to cover, no flagrant 
unrighteousness to forgive. " Be the stern and sad 
truth spoken," says one, " that the breach which guilt 
has once made into the human soul is never in this 
m.s. c c 



386 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

mortal state repaired. It may be watched and guarded, 
but there is still the ruined wall, and near it the stealthy- 
tread of the foe that would win over again his unfor- 
gotten triumph ; " and to quote the high words to 
which I once saw the Parliament of England thrill with 
emotion, " It is against the ordinance of Providence, it 
is against the interests of man, that immediate repara- 
tion should be possible when long-continued evils 
have been at work ; for one of the main restraints of 
misdoing would be removed if at any moment the con- 
sequences of misdoing could be repaired/' Oh ! no ; 
be sure that for this young prodigal the vinum demonum 
which he had tasted had still its bitter dregs ; tempta- 
tion was not dead ; not his could ever be the tranquil 
happiness of the unfallen ; the tutum diadema of the 
pure in heart. He had been wounded by the fiery 
arrow, and be sure the scar remained, and sometimes 
throbbed. He had sat among the swine, nor could the 
past ever become for him as though it had not been. 
But he had been healed ; but he had been delivered ; 
but he had been cleansed ; but now he was at home ; 
and as long as he stayed in his father's home his soul 
was safe. 

I have spoken to you, my brethren, solemn words. 
In these last addresses on sin, and righteousness, and 
judgment — on the fall, and ruin, and repentance of the 
prodigal — I have striven, as it were, to finish and 
summarise my witness to the great truths of God — the 
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — as they deal 
with human souls. And I have kept you too. long, and 
I must end. Yet I feel that there are some hearts 
among you in which my words may suggest some very 
serious and awful questions, which now is not the time, 
nor is this the place, to answer. This only I would say, 



xxxvni.] FROM SORROW TO REPENTANCE. 387 

I have but a week more here as your Master, and then 
I depart, and my place will know me no more. And 
for six years you know that my house and my study 
have always been open — open to the very youngest boy, 
who, if he wished, might come to me at all times 
unannounced, and, however pressingly I might be occu- 
pied, you know that you were never sent away. And 
sometimes in sin and in sorrow, and before confirmation, 
some of you, uninvited and unencouraged, have come 
to me quite fearlessly and sought my counsels; and 
if I could think that the words of sympathy and 
advice, then once for all spoken, have been to some 
of you a blessing and a help to smooth your path in 
life, — if they have taught you always, in every difficulty, 
to go straight to God, and not to man — that thought 
would make me more happy by far than any other 
jan. And if there be but one among you who has 
aught to ask me about these, or about other truths that 
you have heard, one week remains before I part from 
you, and I should hold it, as I have always done, a 
blessing and a privilege to help you for the last time 
with that help which experience and years may bring, 
and which may perhaps save you hereafter an erring 
path or an aching heart. And this may be for a 
few. But this I would say to all of you, Oh ! do not 
despise the grace of God that calleth you to repentance. 
Some of you have wandered, some at this moment are 
wandering, from your father's home; some of you are 
sitting there, happy boys it may be to all appearance, 
but knowing that they are prodigals, and feeling the 
death-hunger in their secret souls. Oh ! go up, each of; 
you, into the tribunal of his own conscience, and ask if ' 
it be thus with thee ; and if it be so, oh ! unhappy one ! 
steel not your heart against the arrow of conviction ; 

C C 2 



388 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xxxviii. 

but, by prayer, by penitence, by amendment, arise and go 
to your Father. He will not cast j^ou out, None that 
came to Him has He ever cast out. He will allay your 
hunger ; He will quench your thirst ; He will give you 
the bread of heaven ; He will lead you to the water of 
life ; He will for Christ's sake, for the sake of your 
Saviour — and does not this include all ? — He will 
restore your soul, He will lead you in the path of 
righteousness for His name's sake. 

July 15, 1876. 



SEKMON XXXIX. 
LAST WOBDS. 

2 Cor. xiii. 11. 
" Finally, brethren, farewell." 

The hour has come, my friends, by me long dreaded, 
and for the last time as your Master, — perhaps the last 
time for ever, — certainly the last time as far as this 
congregation, so dear to me, is concerned, — I stand 
in this pulpit to bid you all a hearty, a grateful, an 
affectionate farewell. There must be something sad 
and solemn in these partings. They remind us that 
there is nothing in this world which we can call our 
own ; that all which God gives us is His, not ours ; lent, 
not given ; given sometimes, and then taken away ; and 
sometimes by His mercy given back in other forms. 
They remind us too that our time is short. The sad 
hour which now has come to me will come in turn to 
all of you, though far less sadly, because you, I trust, 
will but be going to larger hopes. But at the best we, 
like our fathers, are only dwellers in tents. Here and 
there — by some sweet well, under some spreading tree, 
on some green spot — we linger for a time ; but the 
evening comes at last, the stars come out, the en- 
campment is broken up, and we must move away. 
And very soon we shall have made our last stay of all ■ 



300 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

the sky will flush with the crimson of its last sunset ; 
the last long shadows of the twilight will lengthen 
round .us ; the last farewell will be sighed forth from 
weary lips. After that our tent will be moved no 
longer ; for then we hope that it will be pitched, for the 
last time, under the walls of the heavenly city, and the 
sun shall go down on us no more. 

Bear with me kindly, my friends. What I said to 
you last Sunday about the repentance of the prodigal, 
was meant in truth to be my last sermon. This is to 
me no great occasion, but a time of sorrow, when I 
would rather lean on your sympathy. Most of you on 
the first Sunday of next term will again be gathered 
here ; I shall think of these long lines of boyish faces ; 
I shall recall many whom I have loved ; many whose 
future career I shall watch with deepest interest ; 
many whose names, though they knew it not, I have 
often borne to God's mercy-seat, as the High Priest 
bore engraved on the jewels of his breast the names of 
the twelve tribes of Israel. But I shall not be here. 
All, by God's blessing, will go on as safely, as happily 
— it may be more safely, more happily — without me. 
I am under no delusions. I have never for a moment 
exaggerated the importance of this change. No man is 
necessary, and no man's work. " Man goeth forth to 
his work and to his labour until the evening ; " the 
evening of my work here has come ; I depart, and it 
is well. 

Always before when I have mounted the steps of this 
pulpit, the one sole desire of my heart has been to 
share with you those thoughts which are the bread of 
life ; — to speak to you so that the very youngest little 
boy might understand ; — to make every sermon an 
influence — infinitesimal it might be, yet real- -against 



xxxix.] LAST WORDS. 391 



the power of temptation; — a warning — ineffectual it 
might be, yet solemn — against those bad, base spirits 
which would have troubled the peace of our souls ; — a 
force — insignificant indeed, and yet appreciable — on 
the side of God. How can I recapitulate, how reinforce, 
in these few moments which alone are left me, all I 
have said to you of temptation and deliverance, of sin 
and forgiveness, of peace and trouble, of the life here 
and the life beyond the grave ? Nearly six years ago, 
to some of you who were then here as little boys, I 
preached my first sermon on " Ye stand this day all of 
you before the Lord your God," desiring to strike the 
keynote of oar common duties in the faith of a life 
spent as under the Eye of God. How often have I 
spoken to you since of our Father, and of our Saviour, 
and of the Holy Ghost the Comforter ; and of the 
tender affection which you owe to your parents, of 
your high duties towards one another and towards 
yourselves ? That, and all else, is over. You and I 
alike will have to give an account to God hereafter of 
an opportunity which now is past. 

And I say farewell to you with a very heavy heart. 
Six years might seem too short a time to cost me such 
a pang in leaving you ; but I knew and loved Marl- 
borough before any of you, its present sons, were born ; 
and when I was here but one year, as an assistant- 
master with Bishop Cotton, even then this place fixed 
itself indelibly in my deepest affections. To me our 
mere physical surroundings are unspeakably dear. The 
river valley, with its towers and trees ; the forest, with 
its mossy glades, and primroses, and waving boughs ; the 
West Woods, with their wild anemones and daffodils ; 
the free fresh downs with the winds of heaven that 
breathe health over them; the natural amphitheatre 



392 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

of Martinsell, and the glorious expanse on which I had 
gazed so often from its green and breezy summit ; and 
how far, far more these, the nearer scenes so bright with 
their thousand imperishable memories ; the terrace, the 
mound, the cricket -field, the wilderness, the roofs of the 
old house rising over the clipped yews and between the 
groups of noble limes. And often, as on these gorgeous 
summer evenings the sunsets have rolled over us in their 
countless waves of crimson fire, I have sat in my own 
garden amid the woodland sights and sounds that now 
seem doubly precious — the peace, the coolness, the song 
of birds, the quiet lapse of the river heard in the still- 
ness, the air full of the odour of rose and jasmine — and 
then heard the chapel bell breaking the stillness, and 
passed through the court with its groups of happy boys, 
and so into the beautiful reverence of this dear House of 
God, with its " solemn psalms and silver litanies " — I have 
thought that not often has God our Heavenly Father 
given better elements of happiness than His free grace 
has vouchsafed here to you and to me. Yet — for the 
outer elements of happiness are nothing if there be not 
peace within — these have been but the least of His 
mercies. Deeper has been His gift of prosperity to this 
place ; deeper the blessing that He has saved you from 
sickness and from evils far deadlier than any sickness ; 
deeper that He has given me so many kind and warm- 
hearted friends ; deeper that He has allowed me to 
help some of you, to gain the affection of many, 
the kindliness of most, the loyalty of nearly all. Yes ! 
dearer to me than aught else, are you to whom I have 
ministered, you whom I have tried to serve. Who 
could gaze on the spectacle of thig chapel, and know 
how rich it is with the interests of the future, and how 
infinitely dear are you who sit in it to so many English 



xxxix.] LAST WORDS. 393 

homes — who, though but a stranger, could gaze on it 
unmoved ? But to one who has been so nearly connected 
with it, — who has shared in so many of our bright 
gatherings and simple pleasures — who has seen you 
dedicate yourselves to God at confirmation, and confirm 
that confirmation at His Holy Table — oh ! I cannot think 
over all this without deep emotion. For these things, — 
for the good hand of my God upon me, — for your unweary- 
ing aid, my beloved colleagues, — for all your honour, 
and faithfulness, and diligence, and docility, my boys, to 
whom I am now bidding farewell — I thank my God, 
and I thank you : and in the great city, among the sick 
and poor, amid the heat and burden, it may be among 
the disheartenments of labour and the strife of tongues, 
the memory of these things will come back to me 
like a cup of cold water in the desert, like the shadow 
of a great rock in a weary land. 

And if you ask me, " Why then I leave it all ? " I 
answer that we do not, my friends, absolutely choose 
our own lot in life. There are sometimes intimations 
of God's apparent will which come to us, whether w T e 
wish or no, like hands that beckon, like a voice that 
calls. Christ bids us live for others, not for ourselves ; 
and when life opens before each of you, it will be your 
business, not to pick and choose the most comfortable 
of the posts that may be offered you, but to go where 
duty calls you, and where you believe that God's work 
may best be done. It was nearly in these words that 
Bishop Cotton spoke to the Marlborough boys assembled 
in this chapel on June 13, 1858, and the fathers of 
some of you were among those who heard them ; and 
if I repeat them to you, their sons and successors, the 
Marlborough boys of this July 23rd, 1876, it is because 
I, like him who spoke them, have striven to act in their 



394 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

spirit. Oh ! in leaving you I have not done what I 
liked, but what seemed to me to be a duty. And if 
ever any of you, who have known and loved me here, 
are called to choose hereafter between what you wish 
and what you ought, and hesitate on which side the 
scale should dip, then, when you recall the question of 
this morning's Epistle — " Know you not that so many 
of us as were baptized unto Jesus Christ, were baptized 
into His death ? " — you may perhaps remember that 
one, who once taught and loved you, strove, even in 
leaving you, to give up much that was most dear to 
him, at what he believed to be the call of God, — was 
ready to let others gird him and carry him whither ' he 
would not. 

And I advise you thus, and I have myself striven 
thus to act, in the belief that, in spite of all appearances, 
this is the only happiness. And as such it coincides with 
my text, Aoittov aSeXcfrol, %a/pere. Finally, brethren, 
at once "farewell" and "rejoice." In this sense I can 
use to you the words of the wounded runner, who 
brought to Athens the tidings of Marathon, and sank 
dying on the first threshold, Xaipere fcal ^aipo/mev. 
"Farewell, rejoice; I too rejoice." Only that the 
Christian adds with St. Paul, Eejoice, ^aipere, "in the 
Lord." You know that I have always wished for, have 
always aimed at, have always thought much of, would 
always gladly have made any sacrifices for, your happi- 
ness. And how shall you be happy ? Let me, as 
though I were naming you each by your names, strive 
for a moment to tell you how you may each be happy. 
It is the old, old lesson I have tried to set before you 
so often, but, my brethren, it is true. It is by diligence ; 
it is by purity ; it is by sell-denial. It is by being 
clear of vice ; clear of self-indulgence ; clear of self- 



xxxix.] LAST WORDS. 395 

conceit. It is by that seriousness of mind which stands 
in awe and sins not ; by that thoughtfulness of disposi- 
tion which sets a right value on time and opportunity ; 
by that resoluteness of purpose which shall arm you 
both against the sudden onslaughts and the insidious 
approaches of eviL It is thus, and thus only, that 
Christ can be revealed in your hearts by faith. It is 
thus, and thus only, that you can find happiness. But 
thus assuredly you shall find it, and thus my parting 
wish will be a parting prophecy. 

Do you look forward, with all a boy's eagerness, to 
6ee what awaits you in the future ? You need not 
doubt of it. At this moment, brightly or dimly, the 
star of its destiny is shining in your hearts. I see it in 
the ideal you are now setting before you, and in the 
purpose, or want of purpose, with which you are carry- 
ing it out. I read it in those reports of your conduct 
and character which I have just studied with so deep 
an interest. Golden threads there are in the saddest 
life, but it is not of golden threads that the woof of 
any life is woven. To all of you pain must come, and 
inexorable weariness, and many frustrate hopes. All 
of you must weep over the graves of those you most 
dearly love ; all of you suffer from man's meanness or 
man's malice ; and — near or far none knows, but some- 
where in the shadow Death stands waiting for you all. 
But from one thing may God in His great mercy save 
you, and that is "the meeting of calamity with an 
accusing conscience," — the bitter punishment which 
comes of sin. This alone is to be really dreaded ; 
though the natural calamities of life happen alike to 
all, they come differently to the wise and to the foolish, 
to the wicked and to the pure. To the foolish and 
the wicked they come with crushing anguish and ruinous 



396 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH. [serm. 

despair, but of the wise and the pure it is infinitely- 
true that 

" He shall not dread misfortune's angry mien, 
Nor feebly sink beneath, her tempest rude." 

Be brave, be honest, be pure, and no real evil can 
befall you. " Who shall ascend into the hill of the 
Lord ? or who shall rise up in His holy place ? Even he 
that hath clean hands and a pure heart, and that hath 
not lift up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive 
his neighbour, he shall receive the blessing from the 
Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.'' 
You may have sorrows — yes ; and failures — yes ; and 
others may grow rich by fraud while you are poor ; and 
successful by baseness while you must struggle — yes; 
but you would not change with them. For you have 
been true to the highest that you know. Lowest of all 
men are they who live only to gratify their senses ; 
higher are they who have pleasure in art and nature 
and science ; higher yet they who rejoice in deeds of 
simple kindliness and loathe all envy and calumny and 
hate ; highest of all they who live in the faith of 
eternal thoughts, and are ready to pour out their very 
lives as a sacrifice, if so they may inspire others with 
the same holy and everlasting faith. 1 To live thus is 
Christ, and he that thus liveth hath eternal life. We 
may lose all else that the world wishes ; but this 
cannot be torn from us either by malice or by violence. 
All else may be swept away, even for our good, by the 
billows and storms of God ; this cannot be shaken and 
shall remain. So that when you have learnt to aim at 
this, you will soon learn also to desire nothing beyond 
it. To live thus is to be happy, and in this sense, from 

1 This thought is well developed in Miss Martineau's Household 
Education. 



xxxix.] LAST WORDS. 397 

my heart of hearts, I wish you happiness. Yea, it is 
God's best blessing. It is the blessing which He 
reserves for the brave in battle. It is the peace which 
He sheds upon the pure in heart. 

That, then, is my farewell lesson to you, and it may 
be summed up in the words of the Psalmist which I 
have quoted to you so often, " Keep innocency, and take 
heed to the thing that is right, for that shall bring a 
man peace at last;" and if you set this ideal before 
you, Christ will enable you to fulfil it. But I would add 
to it, again in St. Paul's words, the one request, " Finally, 
my brethren, pray for us." Oh ! believe me, I mean it. 
It is no mere conventionality : I mean it very earnestly ; 
I ask it of you — of all of you — as my last boon. I do 
not say pray for me always, or pray for me often, or 
even pray for me ever again : to do so would be unreal ; 
but your Master asks you to pray for him now. Oh ! 
I do ask every one of you, from the oldest master to 
the youngest little boy — I do ask you to offer up one 
prayer for me now. When I left the beloved and 
famous school where I laboured for fifteen years, on 
the evening of January 29th, 1871, preaching for the 
last time in Harrow School Chapel, I asked the Harrow 
boys to offer up for me one prayer. And I think that 
they loved enough the teacher who was leaving them to 
do it ; and I have sometimes thought that, if my time 
here have been blessed and happy — and it has, my 
friends, been deeply blessed and abundantly happy — I 
have sometimes thought that, in part at least, I owed it 
to those prayers. And, going to scenes less full of hope 
and promise, I ask the same thing now of you, my 
Marlborough friends and my Marlborough boys. In 
less than one moment my voice will have waked its 
last echo — we shall then join for the last time — we who 



398 IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH, [serm. xxxix. 



leave, and you who will return, in our parting hymn ; 
and then, — after the blessing, — for one moment the heads 
of all of us will be bowed in prayer. Oh ! will you 
as the last boon I ask you, will you, if I have been 
kind to many, have wished to be kind to all, have been 
wilfully unkind to none — will you in that one moment 
before we arise and leave the house of God, every one 
of you, pray for the Master who is leaving you, and for 
those most dear to him who have lived among you ? 
Let me feel that during that one moment the hearts of 
six hundred of God's children are imploring Him for a 
blessing on us in our new home ; for grace and consola- 
tion amid its trials and difficulties ; for power to do 
good to the souls of others in the great city; that, 
whatsoever else befall us, He may teach us to do the 
thing that pleaseth Him — for He is our God; — that 
whithersoever else it guide us, His loving Spirit may 
lead us into the land of righteousness. 

Juhj2S, 1876. 



THE END. 



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